3 proven ways to banish social media overwhelm

Tips on how to create content and get it posted quickly and easily            

Social media overwhelm is real. I've seen it happen to even the most organised of business owners.

You begin feeling like you're in control.

But soon, you find yourself trying to juggle every single social platform you think you need to be on and willy-nilly sharing random content that's not suitable.

You start looking around for the best tools to help you and find there's so many. That leaves you even more confused!

At this point, many business owners reach out to social media managers (like me) for help.

The first thing I ask about social media surprises many business owners

When clients are at the point of social media overwhelm, I start by asking, 'Do you know where your audience is online?'.

If you can't answer this or don't even know who your audience is, you'll never wrangle the social media beast. The key to social media is to build your profile, share your knowledge, and ultimately make sales.

But if you're not posting content or connecting with people who'd need what you offer, you're not going to find any success on social media.

To make it work for you, you need to start by determining what platforms you should be on (and it doesn't have to be all of them yay!) and what content you should be sharing to connect with your audience.

Here are my top 3 ways to reduce (and banish) social media overwhelm

There are many ways you can banish social media overwhelm. And everyone will have differing opinions and advice on this.

As a social media manager, I will naturally say the best way to banish social media overwhelm is to outsource it totally (to someone like me!).

But I know some business owners still enjoy it but are looking for ways to make it easier. So, here are my top hints.

1. Content Audit & Planning (Your content calendar)

Trust me on this as it's easier than you think! Start by creating an Excel or Google Sheet. List all of your evergreen social media posts and blogs with a link to them for quick reference. These are things like your tips and tricks that educate your audience. You can reuse these throughout your content calendar.

Now think about your FAQs – what do your clients or customers repeatedly ask you about? Turn these questions into posts with a branded graphic and voila – more content to add to your calendar.

Look what others are sharing and spread the love. If you see a post from a colleague that you think your audience would appreciate, share it (with acknowledgement of the original post – never copy someone).

Hint: If you're unsure of what your audience wants to hear from you – ask them. Go straight to the source. And monitor their responses to your posts.

2. Use Tools

I know there are a zillion tools available (and something that causes social media overwhelm!), so I wrote a blog about my top 5 social media tools. Here's a recap:

• Buffer is a super user-friendly social media tool for scheduling to the major platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. It's been around for ages now and is highly popular with it's clean, uncomplicated interface (that I personally love).

• Canva is used for creating high-quality graphics. I think of it as graphic design for dummies because it's so easy to use and enables you to create your own on-brand memes for your social media platforms. It even provides the right size templates for each platform.

• Creator Studio is Facebook's very own scheduling tool. It's free to use, and you can schedule your content to Facebook and Instagram simultaneously. There is training available, but you'll find it very easy to use.

• Google Sheets is just like using Word or Excel but is a cloud-based application. It's what I use to craft my ideas and my content plans. As it's all online, it's easy to share the sheets (or folders) with other people so you can collaborate on your content planning and ensure it's all stored in one place.

• Sprout Social is my social media tool of choice when it comes to analytics. It's all good and well to be posting to social media, but without analytics, you have no idea what is working and what isn't. That's where sprout social steps in, providing easy to understand analytics.

3.      Batch your content

This is where your content calendar comes into play. You can download one here if you haven't already. A content calendar helps you know what you've got coming up in the next few weeks, months or even year if you're super organised.

People who spend time every day creating content and posting it to social media (one post per day) will be those suffering from social media overwhelm the most. It's time-consuming and totally distracting.

When you know what's coming up, coupled with your list of evergreen content and your social media branded graphic templates, I suggest you set some time aside to batch your content.

Block out some time in your schedule. Then sit down and do a batch of images or posts, videos or blogs (which are fantastic for getting snippets out of FYI).

Hint: Once you've created a batch of content, use a scheduling tool like Buffer and upload them ready for their online debut. Voila – your social media is taken care of for a while.

Are you coping with your social media and making it work for you?

How are you going with your social media? Are you reaching your audience and giving them the content they need? Have you found quick ways to get it all done? I'd love to hear your thoughts or any tips you can share in the comments below.

If social media overwhelm has become a real thing for you, and you don't want to bother with it any longer, please get in touch and let's see if I can help get you back on track.