Five Secrets To A Balanced Business and Personal Social Media Presence

When you operate as a social media ghostwriter, it can be difficult to keep up your own social networking. Days will come where you feel as though you’ll pull your hair out over it. What are effective methods to deal with this constant tension? Well, here are five secrets that I’ve learned from my own experience:

1. Don’t feel too pressured to maintain the same barrage of updates as with your paying clients – If you’re a freelancer like me, when you’re posting social updates ‘off the clock’ it almost feels like a waste of time. Remember, you’re still growing your visibility and networking even with one to three quality updates per day.
2. Spending time on your own social media updates can be therapeutic (and strategic) – Writing a personal update via Twitter about your hectic workday or even the fact that you’re falling behind on freelance work can not only feel like an emotional weight lifted, but may reward you with sympathy or timely advice from the social community. Not only will it bring your blood pressure down, but you may generate new connections over your honesty and emotional approach.
3. Be intentional to carve out time for updating your own social profiles – I find that if I wait until other work is completed before I tweet or post a link on Facebook that it never happens. Force yourself to put up an update before beginning your freelance or other business-related marketing.
4. Turn it into a conversation by asking the community – Tweet or post about your dilemma and wait for the social media community to offer their collective wisdom. And, as mentioned above, you might be surprised at the growth of followers who have either been afraid to publicize their emotions or are ready to branch out from their own group of confidantes.
5. Some of your social connections could benefit the company you work for – It’s very possible, as has happened to me, that a person or two in your social circles could benefit your client. Whether it’s website design, legal services, financial advice or the like, it could prove to be a powerful and natural networking technique.

If you’re new to social media marketing, realize it will take time to adjust to the intensity and breadth of growing followers around the particular branding of the company you represent. Even though it may feel like you’re emotional energy is being sapped by building their business, it doesn’t have to detract from your own presence on the web.

Finally, it is possible that some of the links (a cool viral video) you’re using for work could be very useful and relevant for your own social network; content that you otherwise would have never discovered on your own.