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t’s Labor Day in the US, and many businesses are closed today to honor the contributions of the worker in the US. You may be off today, or any other day for that matter, but social media never sleeps! However, with the recent US government shutdown, the EPA sent their workers home and mandated that they do not tweet!
How can you walk away from social media for a day and still be a part of the game? Embrace the Ferris Bueller in you and take heed of these ideas!
It’s important for everyone to shut down now and then to re-energize, reorganize and reinvigorate! Here is what you can do to take a day off from social media and still look as if you are tweeting, blogging and ‘Linking’!
5 Ways To Take A Day Off From Social Media
1. Schedule Your Tweets In Advance. The day before you rest from using Twitter schedule your 8-20 tweets using HootSuite. Make sure to:
- Schedule your tweets about an hour apart, since the life of most tweets are under and hour.
- Mix up your tweets with your own content, curated content and others’ retweets.
- Follow the best practice to create the perfect tweet.
2. Use An Autoresponder To Message New Twitter Followers. While using an autoresponder is not the best way to manage the beginning of your new one-to-one relationships, they do work in a pinch. A touch is a touch, so make sure to follow these guidelines when creating your auto-response message:
- Keep your message short and well under the 140-character limit.
- Include a link to a Twitter-only landing page on your blog. No landing page? Then don’t include a link.
- Be ready to follow your new followers back the next day, if it makes sense.
- Be ready to respond to your DM’s or messages immediately the next day to make sure you are nurturing the new social relationship.
3. Optimize Your Blog Posts With Keywords. A well-optimized (for keywords) blog is your always-on, 24-7 social media workhorse. Optimizing your blog for the best format and keyword selection cannot really be done the night before you take off from social media; however, start optimizing today to make sure people can easily find you for your next day off. Key items to pay attention to are:
- Select a keyword and keyword variation for which people are searching.
- Include your keyword in the blog’s title, first line of the blog and in at least one of the subhead titles (i.e., h2 tag).
- Try to have about a 2% keyword density throughout your blog.
- Include you keyword in the blog’s meta description.
- Include the keyword in the URL.
4. Schedule Your LinkedIn Update In Advance. HootSuite is the ‘MacGyver’ of social media tools with its ability to schedule, listen and measure! Use HootSuite, or your tool of choice, to schedule your daily 1-2 LinkedIn updates. If you are not updating your LinkedIn profile at least once on a daily basis, then you have some extra preparing to do before you take a day off!
5. Favorite Your Shareable Articles So You Send Them Tomorrow. Feedly and Flipboard are great go-to sources for news that can be turned into curated content. While you will likely not take a break from reading the news (even I have cancelled my paper edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer and depend on Feedly for my news), you can take a break for real-time curating and scheduling content. For instance, use the “Save For Later” feature on Feedly and schedule your curated content tomorrow!
Do you have a tip that you can share that saves you time or lets you take a day off from social media? If so, please do share below! Or, contact me directly at MarketingThink.com or on Twitter @GerryMoran.
Whether you plan to take the day off today, tomorrow or on an upcoming holiday, use this advice to help you re-energize, reorganize and reinvigorate! I am signing off for the day and cracking open a cold IPA. It’s always 5PM somewhere, right?
Does absence make the heart grow fonder?
So here’s a thought for you – perhaps our readers would also like a break from us?! In the “good old days” when the boss went on holiday, it gave a team the opportunity to have someone new stand-in (or one of the team), and experience a fresh take on projects and programmes for a couple of weeks.
With the relentless “cult of self” and obsessive personal control, we seem to have lost the ability to delegate, share or genuinely embrace other people’s perspective. Wouldn’t it be great if we could incorporate more “guest spots” in to our blogs while we recharge our batteries, and if it was made easy for someone to speak to our social followers on our behalf? Maybe as a fun way of bringing on a fresh new voice to a debate?
The world won’t stop turning without us – and maybe our fans would love us a bit more on our return?
Nicely timed and well written article Gerry! Thanks for the kind words – especially loved the part about HootSuite being the ‘MacGyver’ of social! Gave me a chuckle.
-Connor from HootSuite