Content Marketing lessons :

Social Media Hiatus: How to Take One and Stay Productive

What is a social media hiatus?

Things are good in moderation, and social media is no exception. A social media hiatus is stepping away from the screen with the intention of getting a breath of fresh air. It’s important to detox your mind and focus on other things in your life without 24/7 distractions. By proving independence from social media, you may feel it easier to maintain the phone/life balance when you return. Furthermore, you may find yourself more productive and creatively invigorated upon returning.

Why would you take a break from social media?

In the digital age, having a consistent presence across social media channels is a necessity. Social media can maximize the success of your brand. In the micro-attention economy, you’re constantly fighting for the attention of your readers or customers. Your brand is competing with hundreds of other brands that are also throwing information at your target audience. Whether you’re the content producer or consumer, social media can feel like a black hole that can be hard to get out of. We spend hours that result in suffering from overstimulation and often feel unproductive and sluggish or uninspired after staring at a screen. 

How do you take a productive social media hiatus?

As a content creator or marketer, it is important to keep in mind that your consumers aren’t necessarily taking a break with you. One of the most important elements of building success over social media is engagement with your followers. There are automated tools that aid with social media planning to keep your followers stimulated with new content. These tools can help you plan and prepare for your social media hiatus — and also help you maintain the balance when you return. 

You can plan and schedule content across different platforms making it easy to push content out from one tool using programs like SproutSocial and Hootsuite. You can also use the Issuu Story Cloud to create Visual Stories using tools and draw readers into your publications. Finally, email automation tools like Iterable and Mailchimp help keep your pre-planned automated campaigns running smoothly.

Related: How to keep your audience during a hiatus

How do I get started?

If you’re running a business through social media, it would be detrimental to step away from your social media “cold turkey”. Like a vacation, it should be planned. Once you have settled into using social media tools, plan and schedule content to last you through your social media hiatus.

One suggestion is to create enough Visual Stories from your recent publications to keep driving traffic to your existing content. When you return to social media, hopefully you will enter the reset with a sense of balance between being on and off. There needs to be a separation between work and life, so treat social media the same way. Allocate specific hours of the day dedicated to creating, consuming and scheduling content. After that, turn it off! There are settings on your phone that will make the app unavailable after a certain hour. Once you know that you can indeed live and function without it, it’s about maintaining that belief.