You wake up with a start, gasping for breath. The nightmare is still vivid, as if it’s been permanently tattooed to the inside of your eyelids. It wasn’t a monster. It was your boss. And all he said was, “Let’s add TikTok to our social media mix starting next week.”
Social media burnout is a real thing. If social media is your thing, you know that it’s hard work. People engage with what you post on their time, which is usually not during office hours. HubSpot reports that 80% of customers expect you to respond to their social media posts within 24 hours, and half of them say they’ll stop doing business with you if you fail to respond to any negative social post (it doesn’t even have to be theirs).
Don’t let it get to the nightmare stage. If social media burnout is starting to dance on your event horizon, it’s time to do something about it right now.
There are five common signs:
It’s time to start looking into how to snag some of your me-time back if you find yourself relating to these five signs of social media burnout.
Sure, marketing blogs and a gaggle of gurus are hyperventilating over the rise of the social media platform du jour. You should probably listen to them and be everywhere if everyone is a potential customer.
Everyone is not your customer.
Back to your nightmare. TikTok is indeed blowing up on the social media platform radar. It’s already surpassed half a billion active users worldwide. Who wouldn’t be impressed? TikTok achieved in less than three years what it took Instagram to do in about six years.
Look a bit deeper and you find that about a third of TikTok daily users – or nearly 150 million – use Douyin, the Chinese version of the app. TikTok is also popular in other Asian countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Japan, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
According to Oberlo, 41% of TikTok users are between the ages of 16 and 24. It also skews toward males (56%). You most likely need to be using TikTok for social media marketing if it turns out these stats sync with your target demographic.
If they do, maybe you should revisit your inclusion of LinkedIn. Oberlo reports these social media platform users are decidedly male (57%) and between the ages of 30 and 49.
Get a handle on your social media by pulling away from the platforms that don’t connect with your target demographics. There’s overlap. So slice and dice further. Which platform does the best job of connecting with your target using content you can most efficiently create?
A brand’s social media followers don’t just want posts about the brand itself. They’re following to find ways to fit your brand into their worldview, and that means they also want you to share what you also find interesting. The most successful brands using social media understand and avoid the danger of total self-promotion. Nike seldom features shoes in their Instagram account. Try finding one of GoPro’s cameras in their social media postings. Instead they share the photos and video users take with GoPro equipment.
Sharing what inspires us or what we find interesting is an innate human desire. It should be an integral part of your social media strategy. The overarching benefit is that it prevents you from burning out trying to come up with original content. It also shows that you are aware and care about your industry. Objectivity establishes credibility and builds trust.
Anyone who has the responsibility of social media marketing for their organization runs the risk of being overwhelmed and burning out if they don’t use scheduling and automation tools – and that risk increases when multiple social media platforms are added to the equation.
Social media management tools allow you to coordinate campaigns by posting in advance. Many of these tools can also advise you on the best times to schedule these posts, and they can help you repurpose posts by monitoring performance.
As you move along the level of sophistication, you’ll find that these tools can even take much of the manual effort out of formatting. It’s possible to create posts that are optimized for presentation based on the social media platform selected.
Social media’s top objective is engagement and interaction. These social media tools excel at helping you stay on top of this task.
New platforms will continue to pop up – and blow up. Social media is a component of inbound marketing. Marketing is only successful when you can determine a return on investment. Social media burnout is proof of negative ROI. Avoid it by remembering it’s a tool that you control.
If you are looking for help with content creation, social media, landing pages, etc., let us know! We’d love to get to know you and see how we can sprinkle some bacon on your digital presence.