How to stay motivated & consistent on social media
If one of your New Year's resolutions is to be more consistent on social media but you never feel motivated enough, this is the blog post for you.
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I want to give you a few tips on how you can stay motivated and how you can increase your chances of sustaining a certain posting schedule on social media for the long term:
1) Motivation vs discipline:
The first and probably most important thing that you have to learn when it comes to being consistent is the difference between motivation and discipline. And more importantly, how to be more disciplined when you don't have the necessary motivation.
Even as a Social Media Strategist who really understands the importance of social media, I don't always have the motivation to post. But still, I put out posts consistently on my own account and my clients' accounts, week after week. The skill that helps me to do that is not to be motivated all the time because, believe me, I have weeks on end where I don't feel motivated at all to do content, and then, other weeks, I feel super inspired and I have so many ideas and it's really easy to create content. The skill that I have that allows me to be consistent on social media is self-discipline. So, that, on the days when I'm not feeling motivated at all, I can still bring myself to do it anyways.
!! I'm not saying that you should force yourself to do content & push through in moments where you're close to burning out - please take enough breaks while you’re working. What I'm saying is, in your regular week, and especially when you don't feel that spur of motivation, you need to be able to motivate yourself or have enough self-discipline to sit down and do it anyways. It's really, really easy to say “I'll just do it tomorrow” after a day of work and then postpone it for another 5 days when you don't have that self-discipline.
Just like any other skill, self-discipline is something that you have to learn and practice. In order to do that, you can focus on the negative consequences that not posting will have for your business or you can visualise the positive effects that it would have on your business - whatever works best for you. You could, for example, make a vision board or stick a post-it note onto your desk where you see it every day.
The first thing that needs to change in order for you to be more consistent is to not rely on the moments when you are motivated but rather to learn that you will not always be motivated and how you can be self-disciplined enough to do it anyways.
People often think that there is a secret hack that others who are consistent know that THEY don't know but there is no such thing. It's really just making a commitment and respecting that commitment over a long period of time. It's the same thing with everything else that requires consistency, like going to the gym or eating healthy. You won't always be motivated to do these things, so you need to make sure that something else can come in when you don't feel that motivation so that you can get up and get the things done.
2) Set realistic goals for your posts:
Another reason why people get disheartened when it comes to social media is that they set unrealistic or way too many goals for each individual post. This is again related to not posting consistently in the past because, if you post less, then you put much more pressure on all the posts that DO go out – they then really need to perform because you only put out posts every so often. That leads to you having really high expectations for the individual post and then being disappointed if they don't perform. If you post consistently over a longer period of time, you will understand that it's okay for some posts to flop because others will recuperate that by doing really great.
Before you start writing your post, set one specific goal that this post should achieve, for example: get engagement. Then, add a Call-To-Action (CTA) that is relevant to that goal.
On that note: please don't include more than one (or max. 2) CTAs in your posts. This will only confuse your audience as to what they should do next. Keep it simple!
3) You don't have a strategy:
Last but not least, if you really struggling with motivating yourself, it is probably because you don't have a clear strategy and you're not quite sure how to make social media work for your business. If that is the case, I would strongly recommend you work with someone who understands social media and who knows how to identify any issues in your current strategy or set up a new one with you. This is exactly what I do in my one-on-one sessions. Click here to book a session in my calendar and let's do it!
Talk soon,
Hanna