In this post, we will discuss what social media fatigue is and the steps you can to overcome the same. Believe it or not, there are courses today that help you manage social media fatigue.
Social media fatigue comes across like an invented word. It isn’t. It’s a well-researched condition. A study shows that social media fatigue is users’ tendency to back away from social media when they become overwhelmed with information.
It can affect both businesses and individual users. Individual users have nothing to lose if they don’t post new content on social media (unless you work with social selling as a salesperson) but businesses have a lot to lose.
Compulsive social media use can also contribute to social media fatigue leading to higher anxiety and depression rates.
You ideally want to avoid stress and anxiety, but burning out just because of posting new content is bad. Being active helps you build your brand, and acquire new clients and website traffic too.
There are more than 3.03 billion of us on social media channels.
That is half of the world’s population on social media. If you’re an average person, you spend more than 20 minutes on Facebook every day. But there’s also the fact that attention spans have gone downhill to less than eight seconds now.
Social media fatigue is the tendency to withdraw from social media characterized by atypical anxiety and the feeling of overwhelm at the thought of visiting different social media sites and posting your content on them.
Social media fatigue is the tendency to pull back at the thought of the work required to maintain connections with so many friends and followers. It also leads to boredom.
SMEs routinely spend an hour or more on social media channels spreading their time across different channels. You can be a handyman or a roofer talking about your services or promoting your roofing resources like this Roofer Salary Guide. Half of the business owners are taking lessons to work with social media better.
They are trying to get followers, drum up engagement and get more website traffic to their offers, ultimately leading to conversions from social media.
A lot of people running businesses feel stressed out and overwhelmed. They panic over social media for reasons ranging from the unrelenting pressure to be perfect and to do more than everybody else is doing. The competition never ends so to speak and that’s the reason for the feeling of inadequacy that sets in.
SMEs are constantly trying to evolve, connect with influencers and struggle to get more followers.
Social media is a poster wall of comparison with research pointing out that these comparisons can cause more anxiety and result in increasingly higher levels of stress.
This unrelenting pressure of building a business from scratch, and promoting it successfully on social media can lead to social media fatigue. The very idea of posting new content fills them with fear. There’s very little focus, lots of irritability, and high levels of anxiety. There’s a lot of pretend working going by with business owners busy scrolling and wanting to look busy. These all manifest fatigue. You simply don’t want to create and post new content anymore so you scroll mindlessly or stop visiting these sites at all. That’s why every now and then a break is essential.
The declining engagement on social media or eventual loss of followers due to these sites changing their algorithms often translates to low engagement on their social accounts for business owners. Again, algorithmic flips are the cause of more stress and resulting social media fatigue.
If you share a similar feeling here are few steps that will help you overcome your anxiety with social media marketing.
1. Step away from social media
You can always take a break from social media. We should normalize taking a break because your business won’t go under the bus during the little time you decide to step away. It doesn’t matter if you’re a growth marketer or in some other profession. It’s time to re-evaluate and come back to things with a fresh perspective.
You can disappear from social media and there would still be enough ways for you to connect with people. There’s no dearth of ways to connect even your customers. Use the time you get to get creative in promoting your business. People who like the work and want to connect with you would stay with you no matter what happens. 
Others who are not interested would leave no matter what you do.
Sometimes doing everything all at once is what results in fatigue and in all those cases you may feel like outsourcing the task to someone else or hiring a marketer to do the job for you on platforms like 1840.
You can do email marketing, write blog posts, or study about the latest trends like AMP in email while you step away. All of this will generate new bookings for you.
2. Be selective
Social media is a vast playing field. It’s not really possible for you to manage all the different channels and post useful content at the right time, every time. Do this: Prefer one channel, focus on it for some time, and build connections that matter from your efforts. For example, if you’re offering call center quality templates or checklists, LinkedIn might be a warm place for getting attention on these templates. Instagram? Not so much. Instagram is great for sharing food recipes, lifestyle posts, and more.
There are many people with similar interests who would want to connect with you.
For example, some like LinkedIn. If you are a financial wizard who likes talking about NFTs, blockchain and similar stuff LinkedIn is ideal. Others are Twitter fans. On Twitter, you can post content in conversational banter. The medium is designed in a way to encourage comments. Focus on one or two platforms to reduce the pressure and reduce the fear you may have.
3. Less is more
On social media, we’re trained to believe that we must post as much content as we are able to. For example, as a recruiter, you can talk about challenges of talent management. Many times, less is more. You should only post new content when you have something fresh to say.
You don’t need loads of content- just valuable content.
Posting multiple times a day causes more pressure and you may also end up posting content that’s not as valuable.
Most people struggle to post new things every day. If you’re saying something make sure you reflect on that. That’s knowledge going to be available in the public domain. Ultimately you get only a few conversions from the thousands of followers you have. Isn’t it better to generate a few useful leads from a small subset of 100 or 200 followers rather than raking up follower counts to a few thousand?
Another idea is to post answers to questions customers regularly have doubts on. That way your social media account can act as a customer knowledge base.
4. Be creative
Social media is a channel where you should be creative. Creativity requires that you stop working on the phone or computer for a while. Join a pottery or art class. Use a sketchbook. Design a custom t-shirt. Focus on creating new things. If you don’t have the creativity you can hire a marketer who can do this for you.
These things help you improve your instinct. You don’t have to doubt yourself. It’s important to have some alone time to yourself and be creative. If you want to see what competitors are doing without them getting any wiser about it, use LinkedIn’s private mode to hide your activity from competitors.
5. Start communicating on social media than simply posting
It’s easy for anyone to create 140-character tweets and post these regularly. However, despite the work you’re putting in, the response from your target audience may not be as enthusiastic.
You can up the number of tweets to make up for previous tweets to find even that’s not working.
Instead, create a conversation with the help of a hashtag event every week.
Hashtag events are one of the best ways to communicate with Twitter users. You get to know them better and this leads to an entire community that wants to support you and listen to your future tweets. The Designhill logo maker team posts new contests on Facebook every week. This creates participation. 
It’s a great way to catch up on your love for Twitter. You might want to send traffic to your landing pages but making social media all about building your list or email marketing is going to hurt you. Build relationships instead.
6. Be inspired by people you like and revere
It’s time to take a break from your regular social media postings. Take a break and observe what other leaders in your industry are doing. Learn from them, and learn how they keep their content exciting and engaging for their followers.
Look at their signature moves and adapt their ways to match what you are doing. This will inspire your followers and they will start sharing your tweet.s
7. Don’t do what others are doing- think differently
As a social media creator— creating and scheduling content about your business might be the first thing on your mind. But, there are also several prolific users who post about their life, their love for sports, and similar things and not just business or other serious things.
The main goal is to speak about your business, drive traffic to your landing pages and more. But don’t let that pigeonhole you into a set path where you don’t talk about anything else.
The strategy is to make your social content interesting. They should be fun. Again I also feel that you must make use of other channels to promote social media content. For instance, why not use email signature branding to link to your social media channels? Anyone getting your email might also be inclined to check you out on social media.
There are so many different aspects in which you can make your presence felt.
8. Set aside time for social media
One of the most effective strategies for social media promotion is to establish a certain period of your day, and dedicated time for social media activities. These hours can be your happy hour where you unwind after work.
The key is to make the social media efforts add to your office hours. You can focus on one particular social media channel once per week.
- Monday: Facebook engagement, outreach
- Tuesday: A LinkedIn post chat
- Wednesday: Twitter hashtag challenge
- Thursday: LinkedIn engagement
- Friday: Instagram Live + Twitter and Instagram engagement
9. Scroll with the intention
Don’t scroll mindlessly. That doesn’t help you in any way. It doesn’t improve the revenues for your business.
Unless there’s competitor research or wanting to brainstorm new hashtags or engage with new clients, don’t simply keep scrolling.
Scrolling is damaging and addictive. There’s the infinite scroll feature that keeps the feeds alive with new content to enable you to scroll endlessly.
Facebook hires the smartest engineers to keep it that way. It’s just like digital cocaine spread over the interface.
Feeling bored or distracted by mindless scrolling does further damage by robbing you of creativity and increasing fatigue even further. Seat up a purpose for your time on social media. Use social media only during this particular timeframe. Rember what you are here to do and do it.
10. Schedule breaks
Be intentional about being screen-free. Your project breaks but then start working on something and go down the rabbit hole for several hours.
Science shows that viewing led screens before bed, makes it take longer for you to fall asleep.
This delays circadian rhythm suppresses the hormone melatonin and reduces the timing of REm sleep.
You must schedule a screen-free time during the day and set up a curfew that you are accountable for.
Say from 10 am to 11 am 2pm to 3pm, and more.
- Set times for walks in the afternoon and morning. Sped five minutes to make you refreshed.
- Make a rule that you won’t look at screens 30 minutes before bed.
11. Use automated software
Be it social media automation tools, scheduling tools, time tracking tools, or an expense report software to manage your marketing and business spend, be sure your company leverages technology wherever possible. This will reduce employee fatigue and boost employee productivity and morale.
12. Be authentic
Being authentic is something most people active on social media channels struggle with. Social media forces you to wear a hat. You use personas to talk to people. You need to remind yourselves that things others are posting don’t offer a full picture of the entire truth. You are seeing the beautiful parts of a tiny window of other people’s reality. Not knowing this is the reason why we struggle with the comparison so much on social media. We often lose sight of who and what we are. Believe in yourself, your brand, and your values.
When you post, interact, and engage with social media. Give it a chance to be yourself. Be genuine and true to yourself.
Social media is more effective if you ignore what everyone else is doing. You don’t have to care about bandwagons, about trends, and about finding solutions that everyone else has. There are different opportunities you can use to fit your marketing for a small business. There’s no need to be part of a one-size fits all strategy. Re-evaluate your business model and put social media at the center of what you’re doing.
Summing up social media fatigue
Social media fatigue is often a result of doing so many different things on social media and getting no proper results from your efforts.
