How to Prevent Burnout as a Social Media Manager

As a social media manager, you’ve undoubtedly experienced burnout at some point. It can be exhausting juggling so many moving parts at once. Yet, social media can ask a lot of you, from constant engagement, replying to urgent comments, and staying on top of trends.

To prevent burnout as a remote social media manager, it’s essential to stay on top of your work and communicate with people who matter most to your job, even when it isn’t the easiest thing on your to-do list. 

With the right tools, the process can become much smoother.

Let’s look at just a few of the tools that can make a social media manager’s life easier and help avoid burnout.

Project Management

There are many project management tools to choose from, such as Workast.

Project management tools can help you keep track of all the moving parts of your job, especially if you have to coordinate with other team members or clients. With these apps, you can create boards for each project you’re working on and add cards for each task. 

You can also assign tasks to yourself or other team members, set due dates, and add comments and attachments. Project management software is a great way to stay organized and ensure everyone on your social media team is on the same page.

Reporting

Sprout Social and Hootsuite are examples of reporting tools that allow you to track your social media accounts. You can see how many people are talking about your brand, how much engagement you get, and which posts perform best. It takes another time-consuming task off your plate, so you can continue to give the stiff arm to burnout. 

Passwords

When working with a wide variety of clients or social media accounts, having a password manager to help you keep track of all the different passwords you need is vital. 

Something like Lastpass, Keeper, or 1Password is great for securely storing all your different websites and accounts. Also, having a strong, unique password for each account helps keep your information safe and avoids potential security issues.

Communication 

Nothing is more of a time suck than having too many communication channels open and searching through them for what you need. A streamlined tool like Slack or Bubbles is especially helpful for remote teams. You can easily create “channels” for different topics, projects, or groups and add people to those channels as needed. 

These async communication tools let you send messages and files to team members without needing to be in the same place at the same time, and they can be helpful when you need to provide feedback on a project or want to keep in touch outside of work hours. 

You can even use apps within these tools to better organize your channels and streamline your Slack notifications. That way, you can easily track who needs to be updated on what and when.

Monitoring 

If you’re tired from constantly monitoring your brand, investing in a monitoring tool will help keep burnout at bay. Apps like Mention and Brandwatch help you to track what people say about your brand online by setting alerts. 

These alerts can include mentioning your brand or keywords related to your industry. These tools are great ways to stay on top of your reputation and ensure you’re responsive to negative sentiment.

Note-Taking

Sometimes, inspiration strikes when it’s inconvenient. That can be for clever social media captions or viral ideas that follow the most recent trend. 

Keeping track of these notes, especially in the off-hours, will help you exponentially as a social media manager. Evernote and Notion are note-taking tools that you can use for everything from writing blog posts to keeping track of these ideas. 

They’re particularly helpful for keeping track of all the different pieces of your work in one place.

Photo Editing

One big task as a social media manager is editing photos, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be tedious. On the contrary, using tools like Pixelcut, PhotoRoom, and Lensa makes editing photos for your social media posts easy. 

They’re perfect for quickly touching up images or creating graphics for your posts. In addition, you can use such features as cropping, rotating, and resizing photos and add filters and effects. 

These apps are a great way to ensure that your photos look their best before posting them.

Social Media Scheduling

Scheduling out your social media posts is advantageous for many reasons, but it’s important to find the right tool for your needs. With options like Later, Buffer, and Planable, you can try out a social media management platform that lets you schedule and publish posts, track who’s talking about your brand, and more. 

Plus, schedule posts in advance for your social media accounts and get an idea of how you can shape your overall grid or brand aesthetic. You can also schedule posts to publish at the best times for your audience and social media channels. 

These tools are beneficial in making sure your social media accounts are always active, even when you’re not.

Email Productivity

Using an email productivity tool, like SaneBox or Clean Email, can assist you in getting through your inbox more quickly by filtering out unimportant emails. In addition, these tools can be useful when focusing on the most important messages in your inbox. 

You can even combine tools to streamline these processes, like extensions for Slack and email that send notifications through one app rather than spread across platforms where they could easily get lost in the shuffle. 

Automation

You may need to find out which tasks are eating up your time. 

Utilizing automation tools, like If This Then That (IFTTT) or Zapier, can take some of the simplest things off your plate. For example, you can set it up in IFTTT so that an image is automatically posted to your Instagram account every time you tweet. 

This workflow can save you time by eliminating the need to do each task manually.

Conclusion

These are a few tools that can make a remote social media manager’s life easier. With the right tools, you can stay on top of your work, communicate effectively with team members and clients, and get your job done more efficiently. 

You can get more done by managing your work better without stretching yourself too thin and risking burnout.