5 stress free social media tips for humans with executive dysfunction

Social media can be overwhelming and stressful so I'm sharing 5 tried and tested tips for making it less stressful - these tips have been tried and tested by me and many other neurodivergent brains in the Social Media for Humans Club.

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Voice over by Hawke Wood: https://www.spotlight.com/3490-9081-8844

Transcript

Hawke: 0:00

hello and welcome to social media for humans the podcast that empowers you to do  social differently. Your host, Alexis Bushnell, and her guests discuss their experience of social  media as business owners users and ultimately humans, with insights and advice to help you  find an effective and ethical strategy that works for you. Grab yourself a drink and join  

the conversation. Alexis: 0:21

hello hi, today we're going to talk about social media tips  for people who struggle with executive function stuff, so I'm just going to go straight into it,  I'm not going to ramble, that makes a change! Okay my first tip is use an all-in-one content planner,  so use something to plan your content that has everything in one place.  Don't be putting stats separately and a list of like key dates for your industry separately  and your media somewhere else and your caption somewhere else and your hashtags somewhere else,  put it all in one place, just get one thing, I don't care what that thing is,  but get one thing where everything is right there in front of you and you can do it all from one  thing. I use the Heart and Soul Digital content planner, obviously I'll put links to that, it's  an affiliate link but I will put a link to that in the show notes and everything. You can also do it  on Notion, there are a lot of Notion templates or you can set up your own. You can also do it  in a Word document or have a folder in some kind of Google Drive, Dropbox, whatever you're using  where like everything is there. The key thing is to have everything in one place  so you're not trying to skip around and find where you've put this and where you've put that  and "oh God I know I wrote a caption for this, where did I put it?" Or "oh I know there's an  event coming up that I'm supposed to be talking about but I can't remember where I put the list."  Just have it all in one place. Also you can just do it in your calendar app it will probably be a  little bit trickier because you would have to link out certain things but I reckon it's doable. I  might have to have a play with that and see. Okay tip number two, this is a Marmite tip; scheduling.  I love scheduling, okay, I'm a big fan of scheduling your content. I will concede  it is not for everybody, if you are somebody who is like "no, I just write my posts and I  post it when I write it and that's fine it works for me," great, carry on, that's totally fine.  If you are somebody, which is a lot of the people I work with,  who are stressed about "oh god I've not posted in three weeks, I really need to write something but  now I'm stressed because I don't know what to write," if you have a life which is busy  and you don't really have the time to come up with and put together a social media post,  or indeed remember that you need to do a social media post this week, or tomorrow, or whatever,  there are many many different reasons that you might want to schedule content. I love scheduling,  I will say it doesn't have to be all or nothing, you don't have to say "I'm going to schedule all  of my content." What you can do is say "I am going to schedule one post a week and then if I have  something else to say, if I have the brain space to come up with something, if I'm inspired by  something, if I have a thing to talk about, I'll do another post and I'll just post it," that's  cool, you can do that. But if you schedule one post a week you know there is something happening  on your social media every week and you don't have to stress about it if you don't come up  with something new that week to post about, that's cool because there's already something going out,  it's great! Tip number three, batch your jobs. Again I feel like this is potentially the Marmite  thing, some people love it, some people not so much, generally speaking though I do think it is  helpful. So if you are creating images, whether that's you're using Canva, you're doing a little  mini photo shoot, that kind of thing, do all of your photos at one time, you know. If you've  got a shop, take all the photos of your stock, just set up a little photo shoot area and just  power through all of them, do all of them. If you're doing selfies, set up your little area,  just go and change tops, it's fine. If you're doing hashtag research, do all of it,  don't be like, this is something I know there's a lot of people do is they will,  when they learn about hashtags suddenly they start writing posts for Instagram mainly and  then they will do the hashtag research based on the post that they've written, so they're doing  hashtag research for every single post, and that's great, I'm all for that, but do it all in one go.  Just stick some music on and lose a few hours of your life down that hashtag rabbit hole,  find some hashtags for all the different things that you speak about and then you can just  grab them and go, you can put them into little chunks, little boxes, like this is this topic,  these are hashtags for this topic, these are hashtags for that thing that I talk about,  and then you don't have to do it again. Same with like caption writing, write all  your captions in one go, don't write the caption go and find an image go and find some hashtags,  do all the captions, then do all the images, or do all the images and then do all the captions,  I don't care which way around, but batch your jobs so that you are focusing on like just the writing,  just the images, because they're different brain states. Tip number, what are we on? Four. Four. Combine structure and flexibility. Okay we are not great at being one thing all the time,  just humans generally, okay, because stuff happens. Me, I love to be organised,  I love a plan, I love a schedule, I love the structure, but sometimes  life happens and if I don't have the flexibility built in I just cry. So rather than cry I have  built flexibility into the structure. This is going to look different for everybody, part of  the way it looks for me is having due dates as in d-o, as in the date you want to do something,  and due dates, d-u-e, as in the date something is due and needs to happen. So having those things  separately so that I can plan to do something on a certain day that is before it is actually  the deadline. In content planning this is probably going to look like having a do date  for your content for next month way before you the start of the month. Maybe you want to have  your do date for your December content at the end of October because then if it gets pushed  back it's fine, you've still got all of November to push it back before it's actually the deadline.  It's it's a handy tip, it works for me, I'm just saying. This also links back to the scheduling  options of like you don't have to schedule all your posts, you can schedule some of them and  still have separate posts that you post manually when things come up. Whatever it is, building in  things to your systems and what have you that allow you to have a great idea and go with it,  or for stuff to happen and everything doesn't fall apart. I use Publer for scheduling, I love it, I  will put up an affiliate link for that in the show notes. If it doesn't work for you there are plenty  of other options Sprout Social is quite a high-end one, probably a bit too much for most freelancers,  very small businesses. Buffer I used to use and love Buffer. Later is great. There's a ton of  different options for schedulers, small companies, big companies, there is something for you. If  you're only on Facebook and Instagram you can use Meta's Business Suite, schedule direct from there,  so there's there's options. LinkedIn now has native scheduling, you can schedule direct from  LinkedIn you don't even need a scheduler. So plenty of options, plenty of options.  And number five, my final tip is figure out what works for you. Okay try some of these tips, if  they don't work for you that's fine, that's fine. I would love to hear what does work for you so  hit me up on social media, drop a comment in the comments if you're watching on YouTube, because I  would really love to hear what has helped you and what works for you around navigating social media,  as a neurodivergent business owner especially, but this is applicable to most humans because  stuff happens and we have to figure stuff out and our brains all work differently, so let's share  some ideas in the comments, on social media, tag me, tell me what works for you and how you sort  of organise your social media systems, what your favorite scheduling tools are, what your favorite  content planning situation setup is, tell me these things because like I'm a nerd, I'd just love to  hear about this stuff. I love to talk about it, I will probably ask you an inappropriate amount of  questions about like why you love that thing, and how you've set it up to work for you, you don't  have to answer them all but it'd be great if you did. So yeah that is the situation. If you need  support with your content planning or figuring out social media generally I am running a special  offer where if you book now you will get 25% off even if you book for September, because a lot of  people are telling me that they are too busy right now to actually be doing stuff because life is  happening but they would like to work with me in September, so if you book now you get a discount.  Who doesn't love a discount?! There will be details of how you can do that in the show notes,  in the description, on my social media, there's tons of it on my social media! I'm very like,  if you're listening to just the audio you're missing a lot of like arm waving today, so yeah,  that's my little social media, tell me about your social media situations. I still don't know  how to, I'm gonna have to watch an old episode just to look into the ending and be like "how  do I end these?" Okay take care of yourselves, yeah that's that's all I've got for you. Hawke:  If you want more regular reminders to find your own way to use social media, follow Alexis on  your social platform of choice, all the links will be in the show notes. Until next time, be a human.