Give Yourself A Social Media Break: It’s Not as Difficult as You Think

May is globally recognized as Mental Health Awareness Month.

Mental health is something that matters every day of the year, we know that. But we want to use this opportunity to shed light on some issues that may be affecting folks working in the marketing space. 

To start, let’s talk about social media–the digital networking tool we love to hate. As well as being addictive, it can also trigger sadness, decreased overall well-being, and unhealthy habits such as drawing comparisons between others’ lives (and businesses) against our own. These issues are exacerbated when we consume social media via our business accounts as well as our personal ones. 

So, how do we distance ourselves from these unhealthy habits while remaining attuned to the needs of our customers and followers? 

1.
Set up an auto-response for when you’re out of office. Would you respond to a work email at 10 pm at night? Probably not. The same goes for social media messages. Decide what timeframe you will respond to messages and let your customers know when they can expect a response. You can set up auto-responses for Facebook and Instagram in your Facebook Creator Studio here. Hot tip: turn your phone notifications off for these apps at certain hours, too. 

2.
Set a timer on your phone for hours used on the app. Decide how many minutes–or hours–you can healthily spend on the app in one day, then set up your preferences accordingly. Most modern phones will give you the ability “shut down” an app for the day after the designated hours of usage have been used. Receiving an alarming notification that you’ve spent over 4 hours on the app that day… well, it usually does the trick. 

3.
Deactivate the app for a weekend. Once 5 pm on Friday rolls around, consider going into your app settings and actually deactivating (and uninstalling) your social apps for the weekend. You won’t lose your account, you’ll only lose the temptation to scroll through it unnecessarily–when you could be using that time to take a hard-earned break from screen time.