Hello, July!

July is officially the start of the second half of the year. If you are the type who needs a new year, month, or week to make big changes, now is a perfect time. Whether that’s something in your personal life or your social media strategy, know that it’s not too late.

While I’m not likely the expert you need if you’re looking to change something in your personal life, I’m always here to cheer you on.

If the change you’re looking for is related to social media, I can totally help with that!

Here are a few of my tips that are easy ways to shake things up and make life easier on yourself as summer gets busy for a lot of us with family commitments, vacations, and changes in business flow.

• Sit down and make a plan. It doesn’t have to be in a vast spreadsheet like I use or even in a paper planner. It can be a piece of paper, a word processing document, or even a to-do list. Start with anything BIG in the month. Sales, adjusted hours for holidays or vacations, events happening during July. Then figure out how you want to promote those. Then think of the rest of the content you want to share with your audience. Remember the 80/20 rule – 80% of your content should do one of these things: entertain, educate or offer solutions to a problem – the other 20% should be promoting your business. That’s hard for a lot of businesses but try to shoot for as close as you can.

• Make time to create content and schedule it out. A lot of business owners and content creators I know set aside time once a week or a few times a month to do the heavy lifting of their content creation, like film reels or design graphics. It means that they are doing things in bulk to make it easier. From there you can schedule time weekly, bi-weekly, or honestly whatever works best for you to schedule your content out. You don’t need a giant program like Sprout Social (my personal favorite) to get advance scheduling done. Meta Business Suite allows you to schedule out Facebook and Instagram posts and stories. You can also use Canva’s Content Planner to schedule it as you create it. Doing this saves time, puts you in the mindset of creating content, and doesn’t leave you scrambling at the last minute to come up with a post.

• Schedule time to engage with your audience. With this, the sooner the better, is my advice. But that doesn’t mean if someone comments on your Instagram post at 2 AM that you need to reply. Maybe you set aside time at the beginning or end of your workday to reply to comments. I am currently trying to do that in the morning when I go through my email. Though I do often reply via my phone in the evening as I’m watching TV or making dinner.

• Balance is everything. Part of the reason I suggest scheduling this is because we all deserve time when we aren’t working, which is a lot coming from a Social Media Manager who really struggles with it themselves. But I’m trying. I’ve got a pretty amazing Auto-Reply set up for my incoming emails that helps me manage expectations for reply time. You can read more about that in my blog: Auto-Response Is Turned On. I’ve set aside time on Sundays for me that doesn’t involve work unless it’s setting up my planner or emptying out my inbox before a busy Monday. In fact, it worked well enough that I took a 3.5 day weekend! I was done with work on Friday, July 1st by noon and didn’t log in until this morning. It was exactly what I needed. Learn more about my latest attempt at personal time in my blog: Slow Down Sundays. Burnout is VERY real and won’t do you, your business, or your loved ones any good.

• If all of this still seems like too much – reach out. Even if all you need is someone to help crush the Imposter Syndrome or answer a question, I’ve got your back. You don’t need to hire me to ask me a question, I promise.

Have a great July!