Hi Social Climbers, and happy 2023 to you!
God, these past two weeks have just gone ridiculously quickly! I had a lovely relaxing first week of holiday, and then a very, very busy second week of holiday that included a grand tour of family gatherings, wrangling an overtired Mini Mapland, and a 1920s murder mystery party on NYE, which was marvellous.
My somewhat manic week got me thinking about New Year’s resolutions, because they’re everywhere, absolutely everywhere, and it’s not just about personal resolutions anymore – they’re for your business as well. Oh, joy! Double guilt! My favourite…
New Year’s Resolutions are all well and good, but we seem to be in the habit of choosing something radical to aim for, and more often than not we end up missing our lofty targets. So I thought we could take a look at how you can commit to a reasonable resolution for your social media.
How many times a week should you post?
It’s the age-old question and one that gets asked no matter what time of year it is!
We all start the new year off with really good intentions: “yes, I’m gonna post three times a day, every day, forever more,” and then we get busy, and we can’t really manage to post three times a day every day for the rest of time.
I would recommend starting with two to three posts per week. That’s enough to get your content showing up in people’s timelines. Any less than two posts per week and it’s something of a wasted effort. You don’t necessarily have to post every single day: that can be quite a lot of work, and if you’re trying to post multiple times a day,
that’s a full-time job, on top of what you’re already doing.
If you want to set yourself a target for how many posts you’ll do each week, make sure that you’re realistic with it. Have a little think about what you can realistically achieve. How long does it take you to create one post? What kind of posts do you want to share?
How long should you spend creating content?
As a general, very loose rule of thumb, social media posts take around 20 minutes to create (if you’re not used to doing them all day every day!), but these timings will vary dependent on the type of post you’re doing.
Sharing a link to an interesting article on LinkedIn won’t take you twenty minutes. Shooting, editing, transcribing and uploading a video will absolutely take you more than twenty minutes. I’ll happily spend at least an hour of my time creating a 3-minute video (and that’s including time for me to royally fluff it up/decide my hair looks weird in this version, so I should definitely reshoot/ask myself what the hell that is in the background…).
If you’re not sure exactly how much time you should allocate for creating content, just time yourself!
Are you having a focused day, or an “oh look – SQUIRREL!” kind of day?
Are there certain times in the month when you feel more creative, or when your workload is a little lighter? Factor that into your calculations as well.
So, if you are managing your own social media, keep it realistic. Have a little think about exactly how many posts a week you can do, whether you schedule them in advance or whether you’re going to do some on the fly.
Personally, I find it a bit easier to stick to scheduling things in advance because I love a scheduling tool: it just makes my life so much easier.
I wish you all the best of luck with your resolutions – knock ’em dead!
