How To Use Social Media in a Productive Way

Even When it Makes You Anxious at Times

I was 20 when I started working. Back then, I was an intern for an online health magazine owned by a Journalist from a top media station in Kenya. Although the position was unpaid, it made me feel all grown up. My deliverables included 2 articles a week which were easy to meet.

When I was done with University, I started tarmacking and applying for jobs in the statistics and finance sector. It would be great to practice my economics and statistics degree, or so I thought. After a while, it proved futile and I decided to monetize my blogging hobbies and dabble in social media managing.

I’d say I’ve been pretty successful in making a living and monetizing my hobby through content writing and writing social media copy. However, it hasn’t come without its issues. I’ve written about how social media brought anxiety. Often, when you get into a company with no infrastructure, so many roles get warped into one.

Designing, writing the marketing copy, posting, engaging with users online and other administrative work. This can make you feel like your brain clocks out of work every time you clock in.

After taking a social media sabbatical, I’m at peace with sharing on Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. I use it primarily to engage with other writers, bloggers and to make myself accessible to people who need writers.

I knew I had to write these social media articles when I kept seeing other writers, marketers and social media managers on Twitter share their frustrations. Reading those tweets reaffirmed that my struggles were not in my head and the struggles are universal.

Likewise, you can use social media to mine for article and content ideas. By following people in your industry and interacting with them, you’ll learn a lot.

While this is obvious, we’ve all had the internal struggle on whether to share our work or not. We do not want to be too salesy. We are afraid of what family, coworkers and friends might say or think about our work.

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