Finding Balance: Tips for Using Social Media Mindfully and Avoiding Burnout

Social Media is an excellent tool for your business if you use it wisely; nonetheless, it sometimes gets the best of us when done poorly.

While these digital platforms opened the door for you to promote your business, the constant stress that goes with managing them can make us feel bad, or better said, burnout.

Social Media Management is more stressful than what many non-digital workers would say it is. If you are a stand-alone entrepreneur, chances are that you have to create, publish almost daily, and attend to customers on your platforms, or if you have a complete team helping you with that, they can get tired, too. Social media keeps a tiny line between entertainment and work, so while work can tire us, mindless scrolling can also do it. The burnout is so high that according to a Sprout Social survey, almost 63% of social media professionals have experienced burnout during 2023.

Now, we can't say that abandoning social media and going back to the old ways is the solution for this tiredness, as it would be more of a "hara-kiri" for your business and wouldn't help you with your mental health. Instead, we prefer to find comfort in balance as there are ways you can manage your social media time with your overall professional life.

Let's find comfort in managing your work balance better.

Keep scrolling!

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What is Social Media Burnout?

Feeling tired or overwhelmed or simply doing everything automatically, as if you were not there? Many who work around social networks have probably experienced this several times. In more concrete terms, burnout is physical, mental, or emotional fatigue that is directly linked to work stress.

When working in networks, you probably have to deal with the endless tasks around:

• Creating content
• Publishing at the best times
• Responding to endless comments
• Staying aware of trends and much more

To this, we can add a very harmful factor for those who try to progress: networks are a constant comparison with our current situation. When we scroll down the infinite feed of the networks, we keep seeing successful people who live a life of luxury, businesses that have higher sales than us, and, to top it all off, perhaps a photo of an ex-partner who is doing better than you. Ouch, let's ignore this one, please!

With the high competitiveness around, it is likely that your desire for self-improvement forces you to want to give much more of your energy, which may already be at its limit. Consequently, you end up even worse and more frustrated. If you add the cherry on top of all this, you must also deal with negative comments or offended people on networks. Boom, total burnout!

If it happens to you, it is possible that it also happens to your social media team, so everything becomes an avalanche of low energy that hinders your company's growth.

Fortunately, you can avoid this burnout by applying the tips we will give you below.

Pay attention, please!

Establish Priorities and Be Realistic

With well-planned goals, you save yourself the need to want to achieve "everything" at once.

Humanly, we cannot consistently achieve everything at once. Create high-quality content to increase engagement, create ads that take your brand to other markets, or reactivate network sales so your DMs are full of customers eager to buy or contract.

Hold on, tiger, we know you want it all, and with patience, you'll get there, but take one goal at a time.

A goal on social networks can be more linked to the link you see as the weakest within all your results. If it's followers, build brand awareness; if it's low engagement, create content they can't resist seeing and repeating; and if it's sales, then create personalized ads.

Whatever the option, the ideal is that you set well-defined goals for periods and thus do not dilute your effort in many things you may do half-heartedly. By achieving a goal, it remains a pillar, and from then on, it becomes easier to maintain.

Answer Only the Neccesary.

The networks let you see what your audience says directly, and if you are growing as a business, you are excited by every comment and reaction. Therefore, you want to respond to everything.

When you start to have more success, these comments and reactions start to multiply, but they can do so on both sides: the good and the bad.

The networks, if you have enough time working on them, are spaces that can be quite hostile, and if you don't believe us, just spend about 10 minutes on "X," and you will realize it.

So, as the comments and reactions grow, you may now have to take some time to respond, but not everything deserves an elaborate response.

In general terms, you can receive four types of reactions:

• Likes/Good comments
• Questions.
• Complaints.
• Haters/Trolls.

By just reading, you can figure out which ones are worth your time to respond to and which ones you should simply ignore.

Now, although networks ask you to interact to give yourself greater visibility, responding to so many people can lead to burnout, but there are ways to speed it up.

On the one hand, chatbots are excellent tools for responding automatically to complaints or questions. We understand how long it takes to answer each of these questions so these tools will save you a lot of time on these tasks.

As for good comments, reacting or sending an emoji is usually enough; you don't need to thank each one of them either, as this can take up too much of your time.

As for trolls or hate messages, well, haters are an aspect that will not disappear from the networks, and before spending too much energy on them, it is better to only respond to what could be a mistake on your part so that turn a hater into a potential client and ignore those who want to annoy.

Avoid Distractions

Call it procrastination or ADHD, whatever the case may be, we can waste a lot of time scrolling through social media.

Sometimes, the tasks we have are not as demanding as we think; it's just that we waste a lot of time getting distracted by many things. So, how do you stay focused within the infinite feed of any social network?

There are very effective concentration techniques, such as the Pomodoro timer, a timer that assigns you 20 or 30 minutes of interrupted work and a 5-minute break. If you manage to train this concentration muscle for a long time, it will not be so difficult to concentrate in the future, but like any skill, it is something that comes with habit.

Now, although smartphones allow us to do everything from the networks, here we give you a tip that may take away a lot of distractions.

Smartphones are perhaps the biggest distraction we have in our lives. Since a cell phone could have all the possible entertainment at your fingertips, more and more people live slouched and with their eyes fixed on their cell phones, and of course, this ultimately causes fatigue and delays the completion of your tasks.

Silencing notifications or timing apps can work on certain occasions, but unless you have the will of a Roman soldier, it is likely that at some point you will be tempted to browse something on the networks.

So, we recommend that you move these activities to your always-trusted desktop or laptop since scrolling on these is a little more expensive, and therefore, your need to keep scrolling through all the feeds may decrease.

To this, you can add keeping your cell phone out of reach. In any case, through the desktop versions, you can be aware of any notifications and thus make your workspace free of distractions.

Automate and Schedule.

Do you know how many things you do repeatedly and manually are already completely automated?

Behind the discourse that AI "takes away our work," the true purpose of this software is to lighten our activities, thus avoiding burnout. We already mentioned a case, such as chatbots, that can streamline your customer service, but several community management tasks are already fully automated.

Tools like Hootsuite help you schedule all posts at the necessary time so you don't have to publish anything manually. One less worry.

CRMs give you an overview of how your audience is reacting, thus saving you long hours of study and research.

Tools like Chat GPT can give you templates or bases for creating written content, saving you time searching for trending topics and the twist you will give to make it interesting.

Thanks to automation, you save hours of repetitive work.

If you want to learn more, look at the surprising ways automation can boost your revenue.

 Diversify your Sources and Perspectives

Do you know what confirmation bias refers to?

Thinking that something is correct just because all your followers affirm it does not necessarily mean that you are right; sometimes, you have to go a little to the opposite side to check if it is true, or in fact, you were wrong all this time.

Algorithms are specialists in giving you a lot of what you like; they detect your interests and will continue giving you related content so that you continue scrolling endlessly. Because of this, it is not surprising because the networks confirm all our opinions, and we genuinely think we are always right because the networks confirm everything.

However, a confirmation bias can be the anchor that keeps you stuck in the same patterns, which does not allow your business to prosper and, therefore, sinks you further into burnout.

Given this, we cannot think of solving an already recurring problem with the same solutions, and instead, we need to look a little beyond the horizon to investigate what we are missing or what we could try.

When you look a little further, chances are you might find something new that can give a fresh turn to your brand so you avoid the constant mistakes you are making.

Final Thoughts.

It is wrong to want to eliminate social networks to solve an issue such as burnout; leaving these platforms closes a great door to success and growth in the digital world. Therefore, the best way to cope and manage these feelings of tiredness is to change your habits in terms of how you manage your social networks.

With a good balance, you can achieve the professional success you seek while maintaining your peace of mind.

However, another effective way to avoid burnout is to have a digital marketing team that advises you and manages your networks according to what your business needs. For that and more, our team of professionals at Codedesign offers their help to advance your business goals. Contact us!

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