Social media can be a truly draining experience at the best of times. So I’ve been working on adjusting the amount of time I spend on social media and how I am using it. I wanted to share the tools and techniques that have worked for me.

Delete the apps from your phone.

I’ve removed twitter and facebook from my phone. I can still use my broswer to log in but its not as convenient so I’m less likely to do it. For me, I’ve kept facebook messenger and instagram because those are still useful for me, but do what works best for you.

2. Block social media

I open a new tab and automatically start typing twitter or facebook into the url box, even if that wasn’t what I wanted to do! Habits move me on auto-pilot and suddenly it’s been an hour and I’m doom scrolling twitter still. What I’ve finally found is that I need external help to block the sties.

I’ve come at this with three main apps I’m using:

Forest App- On my phone, this wonderful app keeps me from just scrolling through instagram. It allows you to plant a beautiful plant and watch it grow. The trick is that if you navigate away from that app, the plant dies. You can set it from anywhere between 10 minutes to two hours. I set it to two hours when I get into bed and it stops me from getting on my phone when I’m trying to go to bed.
SelfControl- This mac only software is amazing and terrifying. It’s the big dog and the most effective. SelfControl will block the websites you specify for a range of time. It locks it down. You can restart your computer, delete the app, etc. and the lockdown remains until the time is up. It’s incredibly effective and free.
Work Mode- A chrome extension, Work Mode is perfect when I am on my chromebook. Blocking all major social media sites with a simple click, the extension is effective and unobtrusive. The only issue is that it is also sometimes too easy to unblock the sites with just a click as well.

I’m using these digital helpers and techniques to help limit my time on social media and keep it from destroying my mood and my productivity.

Social media.

Everyone always hears that writers need to be on social media. Every time some new platform shows up, people flock to it, setting up accounts that get abandoned in weeks. It’s easy to set up the account, post for a few weeks or months then run out of ideas of things to post.

Whenever a writer (or anyone trying to build a brand online) gets started, tons of questions appear.

Should you be on it? What platforms are the best? How often should I post? Who should I follow?

But the biggest one is: Does social media matter?

Yes. It does, but you don’t have to be on every single platform. In fact that is a recipe for disaster. Don’t feel like you have to be everywhere. The rule of thumb that I generally use for my writing accounts is that it needs to be a platform that I enjoy using.

I know that sounds maybe a little silly but if you’re going to be using your platform, it needs to be something that you’re going to keep using. Now there’s no platform that will be a joy to use every single day, but if it’s somewhere you HATE signing onto maybe reconsider that account. If twitter doesn’t make sense to you and you hate the platform, then you’re not going to use it and a an inactive account does you no good.

For me, that ends up being LinkedIn. I kind of hate the clunky aspect of it and really don’t like to use it. So generally I don’t post to my personal page on LinkedIn almost ever. I login to manage some professional accounts that I’m paid to manage, but otherwise, not interested much in connecting and networking through that particular platform. So I don’t.

Right now I am managing between 12-15 accounts across a variety of platforms. Some of those are my own, some of those are accounts for other people, and some of them are accounts I manage with other people. So how do I manage them? There are ways to make it easier; to make it a manageable task that only takes a few hours of work to do.

Here are some of the things I use to keep

1. Build a word document or an excel sheet of your posts and keep it updated.

Create a living document with your tweets, facebook posts, instagram captions, etc. create 2-3 for every item you want to share. Switch things up every few weeks to keep things from getting stale.

2. Decide your messaging pillars.

This sounds complicated but basically it just means sorting out what things do you want to post about? For my author page, I use the pillars: blog posts, books I love, amazing other people to follow, my books. Then I figure out how much to post about each of those topics and poof it into my schedule. It’s the easiest way for me to not get overwhelmed by content to share. When I start to struggle with what to share, I can look back at those pillars to get inspiration.

3. Schedule, schedule, schedule.

The easiest thing you can do to help yourself out is to schedule your posts in advance, really get yourself scheduled out at least a week ahead, preferably a month ahead. I personally like Hootsuite and Buffer but there are other options like TweetDeck and also within Facebook pages natively. Instagram is a little more challenging because you cannot directly post from a scheduler, but you can set up reminders on your phone or use an app like Later to get posts ready to go.

4. Get some visuals.

It can be helpful to make yourself a few simple images to use to help promote your book or blog post. Canva is (mostly) free, Typorama app is (mostly) free and both are easy to use to build images to use. You can even within the app, specify what size you want for what platform. I also really love Unsplash and get a lot of my blog images from there.

5. Don’t just blast promotion.

Post about your work, be proud and excited about your work but… don’t only ever post ‘buy my book’ stuff. Share other people’s work, post that inspirational quote or funny tweet, get political, share cat photos. Be a real person, people respond to authenticity.

That’s what helps me keep managing accounts, and keeping active on social without having to spend hours and hours on social media all day long because that is a recipe for trouble.