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If you are a business owner or social media manager, setting boundaries with social media is not easy. Sometimes your whole job is based online and social media is essential to ensuring you can get clients/customers.

But that doesn’t mean you need to be checking it all the time.

It’s very easy to get caught up in the cycle of ‘I need more followers to ensure I always have business’ – believe me, I constantly hobble in and out of this state! What you need are recommendations. I thought good old word-of-mouth may have disappeared through the times, and even more now with COVID forcing us to distance ourselves, but it hasn’t. Reputation is key!

Social media is an amazing place for business with enjoyable platforms of valuable engagement, but there comes a time when it sucks too much of your personal time. The main key of advice is, set yourself business hours and continually stick to these.

Check your phone settings

Check the settings on your phone for a Digital Wellness or similar feature. Within this feature you can put time limits on the amount of time you’re on the individual apps. Check each day for a week how much time you’re spending on your phone and aim to cut it by 10% at first, then 20%. Be realistic about how much time you genuinely need on your phone to run your business but number one here is you.

Checking your numbers

One thing I do advise in my consultations is to keep an eye out for analytics. This is key in a business, but be wary not to get too wrapped up in the numbers. Assign one day a week/month with a couple of hours to go through your analytics and pick out the content you know does well. With this information, set time aside to plan your content in a calendar – some businesses prefer to do this monthly. This will save you checking in every morning or evening so you can keep that precious time for yourself.

Creating the content

Once you have a full calendar month filled with planned content, assign the days and times you can create this content. Ensure it is during work hours so the boundary of ‘outside of allocated work hours’ is met. Content marketing is important to your business but your life outside work is just as important. Set weekly limits and use apps to upload in bulk, assigning the dates and times as set out in your content calendar.

READ NEXT: 5 ways to Boost your Content

Crunching the numbers

There are, no doubt, times where analytics will make you feel annoyed and sad. Analytics are like little judgmental figures who point and laugh at you when the page views go down or an article doesn’t perform as well as you thought. Learn from it and dust yourself off! Do not dwell on numbers, you can turn them around and they are not the be all, end all. If you are consistently getting nowhere and finding your business dwindle as a result, you need a whole new marketing campaign and shift of direction in your content. Try different types of content all the time until you find your groove.

Put the phone down

If you are watching TV in the evening and repeatedly picking your phone up to check posts, put the phone out of reach.

If you have set your working boundary as 5pm, yet you pick your phone up to check emails at 5.30pm. Set yourself an hour of personal time on it and then put it away at a strict time.

Your business will not suffer just because you didn’t work every single hour you have been given. You are a person who needs downtime. You, hopefully, understand and respect this of your employees, so treat yourself as you would an employee. If 9-5 are your core hours, turn off all notifications on apps outside of these hours. Try it today and see how it goes for you. You are in control and will feel the benefits of it.

Let me know in the comments below if you have any other tips on going phone free outside of working hours or limiting phone use during work hours.