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How to Reduce Your Time on Social Media to Increase Your Blogging Productivity

Posted By Nicole Avery 8th of September 2022 Be Productive 0 Comments
How to Reduce Your Time on Social Media to Increase Your Blogging Productivity

Photo by Devon Rogers on Unsplash

This is a post by ProBlogger Productivity Expert Nicole Avery

As bloggers, social media is a key tool of the trade for us. It allows us to grow our blogs, interact with readers, build communities and stay in touch with current events and news in our niche. But it can be a massive time suck and decrease our productivity if we let it.

There are two different ways that I see social media impact bloggers’ productivity negatively.

Two Ways Your Social Media Habits Could Impact Your Productivity

Spending Large Chunks of Time

There is the blogger who spends large chunks of time on social media networks, tending to their own community, engaging in other communities, leaving comments, links etc and contributing to online discussions. The rationale behind this is usually to be increasing their exposure and becoming known in their niche.

Constant Checking

Then there is the blogger who knows they shouldn’t spend too much time on social media, tries to stay off it, but can’t help constantly checking in for short amounts of time here and there across the day, that very quickly add up to a significant amount of time across the day.

 

How does this behaviour on social media impact their productivity? It impacts it in three key ways:

  1. The total time spent on social media ends up outweighing any gains that can be obtained from working on their presence on their social media networks.
  2. Multiple sessions on social media through out the day means they rack up a significant switching costs. You can read more about switching costs in this post, but in brief it is the time it takes us to move from one task to another, regain focus and actually start working. Research from the American Psychological Association has shown it can cost as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time.
  3. They suffer from attention residue from their time on social media and it takes them much longer to work on a task like writing a blog post, because their mind is not 100% on the task. For example a blogger is trying to write their post for the next day but a part of their mind is still thinking about the negative comment on their Facebook page and how they should reply to it.

Reducing even by a small amount, the time and number of occasions you are on social media, can reduce the above impacts and increase your blogging productivity. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be on social media, it just means you need to take a more planned and proactive approach to how you go about it. Here are two actions you can take to help you:

1. Create a social media strategy

Signing up to every social media network and spending time daily on each of them is one way of going about create a social media presence, but it is unlikely to be successful. To maximise the time you spend on social media, it is better to have a defined social media strategy for your blog. A social media strategy does not have to be complex and detailed but it needs to cover these key points:

How much time per day/week can you spend on social media?

Look at how much time per day/week you have available for blogging and determine what percentage you can spend on social media. How much time you spend will differ amongst bloggers and there will be times when you may want to spend more time on social media to support your blogging goals. They key is to determine on a regular basis how much time you will spend on social media and stick to it.

What social media networks are you going to be on and which ones are you going to be fully active on?

It is common for bloggers to sign up to most social media networks to have a presence on them, but unless you have a community manager employed, it is unlikely that you will have the time to spend significant amounts of time on all of them. If this is the case then, choose 2 -3 and focus on them. Create great content to share and spend time building your communities on those networks. The net result from having a bigger and more connected presence on fewer social media networks will easily be greater than spending a little time on lots of networks. This podcast episode provides good tips on How to Decide if a New Social Network is Right for You.

Define your goal for each social media network

For the networks that you are going to invest time in, have a goal for why you are there. For example, my goal for Twitter is to be seen as an expert in my niche and to create freelance and media opportunities (it brought me my book deal!), while Facebook is about helping my community organise the chaos of family life through my tips and sharing high quality articles I curate for them. Through helping them as much as I can for free, I am building up trust that will hopefully lead to them buying my products and services.

Determine your posting frequency

Cut through on most social networks is tough, but that doesn’t mean posting more stuff will get you more notice. Buffer recently changed their Facebook social media strategy with great success:

We cut our posting frequency by more than 50% on Facebook and began to truly focus on quality over quantity. What happened next, even the most optimistic social media manager couldn’t have expected:

Our Facebook reach and engagement began to increase even though we were posting less!

Track your progress and tweak your strategy

Each social media network has some sort of analytics associated to it. Look at the data and see how it measures up compared to your goal. If it is working, keep going. If it isn’t work out why and try something new to get the results you are after.
If you’re after some tips to get started on creating your social media strategy check out this article on “How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Blog“.

2. Create a social media batching process

If you are to go on to social media every time you want to post something, you are going to end up decreasing your productivity significantly for the reasons outlined above. There are absolutely times when you need to post live and interact with your followers in real time, but most posts can be scheduled.

Scheduling social media is the perfect task to batch process and instantly increase your productivity. You can read how this happens in a previous post I have written here on Problogger – The Science and Art of Batching to Increase Your Productivity.

Batching means you will allocate a block of time to schedule your social media posts for a week/fortnight/month. To really see gains in productivity from scheduling social media you need to create a process for how you do this. The exact process will differ slightly amongst bloggers, but I will share how I schedule for the key social media networks I am most active on:

Nicole’s Social Media Scheduling Process

  • I have determined how frequently I post to each network and the type of content I share. I use Buffer as my scheduling tool to schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (you can share to more networks but these are just the ones I choose to schedule) and it works out the best time to share on each network.
  • I use Feedly to read blogs and articles. It means I have significant sources of information to share on my networks. I will spend 10 – 15 minutes a few times a week to mark items that I want to share on my networks.
  • I will set aside 45 – 60 mins a week to batch schedule social media posts. I will head to Feedly and go to my “Read later” tab and determine which pieces I will share and to what networks. Some pieces I will share to all three networks if I think it is relevant, others may only be shared to one network. I use the Buffer Chrome extension to schedule the content.
  • I will also Buffer pieces of content from my blog to be shared on relevant networks.
  • At the end of the session, I will go into Buffer and make sure there is a good mix of content shared and in the right order, eg I am not sharing four recipe posts and then four parenting posts, but a mix of different topics.

 

Creating a specific process like this means you reduce the amount of time you go searching for content to share or procrastinating about what to share. Once I have the week scheduled, I see this as my base content and will still often share content, add conversation and respond to questions/comments on my networks when I check in once a day.

Social media doesn’t have to decrease your productivity. Create a social media strategy and batching process so you are in control of how you spend your time on social media and see your productivity flourish!

Do you find you are spending too much time on social media?

This article was first published Jul 14, 2017 and updated  Sep 8, 2022.12

About Nicole Avery
Nicole Avery is a Melbourne mum to five beautiful kids aged seven to 17. She is the master organiser behind the popular parenting blog Planning With Kids and and the creator of the Planned & Present e-course, a step-by-step guide for mums on how to organise the chaos of family life while still leaving space to enjoy it.
Comments
  1. Jamshed Khan says: 07/14/2017 at 6:02 pm

    OMG! Really amazing, After reading this post, I realized my mistake, Because I was wasting my time on social media everyday. Tell me some tips

  2. Jenn Grainger says: 07/14/2017 at 9:16 pm

    Very timely article. The last couple of weeks I’ve gone down the FB rabbit hole. Committing to learn this beast. My brain is fried and sure it’s affecting my mental health with my anxiety peaking. Time to step back and decide who’s boss. Thanks Nicole & PB.

  3. Excellent, Nicole.
    This post will help me to recover my social media journal which I had forgotten in the way.
    Buffer is excellent and you are right about focus in 2 / 3 social network more important for our projects.
    Thanks.

  4. Checking social constantly is a nightmare Nicole. No way in heck you can do this and run a successful blog.

    Ditto on Feedly ;) Saves me countless hours over the course of a month, which I can devote to other tasks, including social media engaging.

    I love working in small chunks. Blocks. This morning I tweeted out 5 of my eBooks. Then I engaged for 15 minutes. Quick and easy with the focus on connecting with 1 human being at a time. Hold the intent to impact humans 1 to 1, and you will be using social media effectively and intelligently. Smart tips here.

  5. McAfeeactivatetech says: 07/17/2017 at 8:56 pm

    thanks for share this blog..

  6. HI Nicole, I love this one. I used to check all the time and I’ve pulled back. I love the Buffer and use Elokenz as well. I do check at social at certain times of day. You can really get addicted to it.
    I try to not even have my phone near me now when I’m writing. And I close all the windows down too. Just what I am researching and anything pertinent for my post. Thanks for sharing your tips with us.

  7. shohan hossain says: 07/22/2017 at 1:57 am

    very nice post….thanks u very much,,,bro

  8. Hi, Nicole!

    I’m still fighting through the Facebook videos dilemma, though. But Buffer did help me in scheduling my social media posts. However, I’d like to add something here. I’ve started blog post scheduling as well. It kind of makes burden off your shoulder. I thought to share with you all.

    All the best!

  9. Hi Nicole,

    Certainly Yes, I m too spending much time on social media. Thanks for sharing your social media schedulings. Now with the help of it, I could create mine.

  10. hi Sir i am a new blogger and i found social media is the key to success in oonline earning, can you plese suggest me some tips to rank my blog . i am also spending most of my time to advertise my post into social media.

  11. When it comes to social media, I know how easy it is to get sucked in. While I maybe meant to go on there to share a post and comment on a few of my favorite personalities, before I know it, I’ve let too much time go by and I’ve watched WAY too many cat videos when I’m supposed to be working. I find that it is helpful to schedule my social media posts in advance so that it minimizes the time I spend on each of the platforms. But I do like to spend a little personal time responding and making comments because that is something that you can’t really automate.

  12. I have to admit … since the number of followers hike in my fb, i started to spend more there than my blog …

  13. Excellent post! Your post is too much helpful me in reducing time that can be very expensive with other tasks.

  14. Hi Nicole,
    its really such a very informative Article i Really Enjoyed to Read this post Keep it up :)

  15. Nicole–thanks so much for sharing this information! I have been an editor and writer for a long time, but I just started my blog this year. Social media is the most challenging aspect of what I am doing. Appreciate your post very much!

  16. A very timely and informative article. It provided good insight and a great help for Social Media Management. Thanks for sharing!

  17. Using a automation tool for sharing post can save some time and tools like Buffer, Hootsuite offers such scheduled posting features that can prove helpful. Thanks for such great advice.

  18. My solution to this problem is hiring business outsourcing solutions. There are Australian offshore solutions that helps bloggers and small business owners’ deal with social media management. Their virtual assistants can handle all the basic social media marketing tasks from drafting a content, monitoring brand mentions and replying to the inquiries of your clients or customers.

  19. Excellent post on increasing productivity. I loved the way you touched each and every topic that actually adds up to the time and we did not notice that. I also use to do the same things before, until I read a blog which explained about the context switching kills productivity. If we can take care the points that you have shared in this post then it will definitely increase one’s productivity.
    Once again, excellent post :)

  20. Anne Niculescu15 says: 08/10/2017 at 2:00 am

    Well, I have to admit I spend a lot of time on social media because sometimes you have many clients to work for and traffic and Likes are all they want. But, you better be sure not to take actions against your ultimate goal. There is a free whitepaper on this topic: www [.] digitalauthority [.]me/social-media-mistakes.

  21. Nicole, love this one. I’ve been using the Buffer for years and it’s awesome. It saves me so much time and love the Chrome browser extension as well as their mobile app.
    I’ve tried several others and only Elonezk comes close to the Buffer.

    When I’m writing content I turn off all my social networks and sometimes hide my phone :) It really helps to focus on the task at hand.

    Thanks for sharing these tips here with us.

  22. Ohhhh…I so need this info! It’s as if you actually know me.

  23. Lucas Smith says: 08/23/2017 at 5:52 pm

    Thanks for this.

    Bloggers tend to worry so much about the status of their social media accounts that they completely forget to attend to the real deal. This post is a really great help when it comes to balancing time for social media and blogging.

  24. Any Facebook time is too much. Facebook users have to have made a choice to let that site use and share all that real-world contact information, so they probably deserve what they get. I’m not sure, though, that they’re aware that Facebook makes their posts hard for non-users to read…so it’s a real lose/lose in terms of publishing and promotion.

    Twitter…is a lot easier to manage if you’ve held on to an “old, outdated” computer. I have two browsers on this computer. The older one brings up an IMAGE-FREE version of Twitter Mobile (I can see pictures only if I click on a link), so it’s really fast-loading, easy to read, and useful! The new one tries to open all those silly videos people insist on sludging up Twitter with, so it drags and hogs memory and is absolutely no fun to use. Before the older browser stumbled into what I now call Twitter User-Friendly, I used to limit Twitter to once or twice a month and post on my blog when “It’s a Twitterday.”

    Google + is underrated…too pictorial to appeal to tired eyes, maybe, but dead easy to use, and I’ve found it appeals to a very *nice* community of readers.

    Youtube and the other visual sites…I visit maybe once or twice a year. For those whose computers are set to function mostly as TV and video games, they presumably work. For me they don’t work so I’m glad that’s not my target audience (my blog being about books and writing).

  25. You have given a great blog which helps digital marketers maintain a perfect balance between social media and blog.

  26. Find your productive time and utilize it, Proper planning will lead to improved productivity and efficiency.

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