Recently, Twitter celebrated its 10th birthday. Facebook is 11, YouTube is 10.
Social media is officially a decade old.
When I started blogging and using social media in 2007, I did all the things. I blogged, I posted on Facebook and Twitter. I had a podcast for a while, and started YouTube channel. Then came Instagram and Pinterest. I happily joined those and use them on a daily basis.
This past year, however, things are starting to spin out of control. Live Video is becoming huge, and Snapchat is starting to take up more and more interest in the popular space.
I’m currently running 3 blogs, 2 YouTube channels, 3 Instagram feeds, 3 Twitter feeds (and overseeing 2 more), I have Snapchat, Vine, Anchor, Periscope, Blab, and am planning to a weekly Facebook Live broadcast.
It’s crazymaking!
Over the last few years, you may have noticed (as I have) that many people are starting to specialize in one particular social media. They will, for example, put all their energy into taking great photos, and building up their Instagram followings. Or they’ll do fun things on Snapchat. Or they’ll build up their YouTube subscribers.
This is the way the world is going, folks. It’s almost impossible for one person to maintain and continuously create content for all these channels, and do it well, even if that is your full time job.
So if you haven’t already, you may want to start thinking about really focusing on one or two social media.
How do you make that decision?
- Where does your traffic come from? Go to your Google Analytics and look at Acquisition. This will show you where your traffic is coming from. You’ll see almost half of my traffic is coming from Facebook–I should probably not give that up. G+ on the other hand? Not much going on there.
- What do you love? Choose to focus on a social media that you absolutely love. This way, making content for that channel won’t seem like a chore.
- Get scientific: Use this (uber geeky–lots of spreadsheets, yay!) method from BuzzStream: Too Many Channels, Too Little Time: Build a Social Media Strategy that’s Right for You.
Also, don’t forget that if you don’t want to give up a social media entirely, you can use tools like IFTTT or Hootsuite to create ways of repurposing your content. Just make sure you are indeed repurposing, not just autoposting from one network to another. You have to respect the rules of the individual networks, which means no @mentions and #hashtags on Facebook, making sure your post fits into 140 characters on Twitter, etc.
Another thing that may help you to feel less overwhelmed when it comes to creating and maintaining content is to use a social media calendar. Plan your entire week, or your entire month, and then you just have execute, rather than be scrambling around for content. Here are some good templates from Hootsuite.
How do you manage your feelings of being overwhelmed by all the pressure to “keep up?” I’d love to hear in the comments below.
