How Much Time Do I Spend On Instagram/Blogging
Well, I wish that my blog and Instagram account would just write themselves. Man, life would be so much easier as a full-time working mother if it did. But because it doesn't I spent one week tracking how much time I spend on my social media business to give you guys an idea of what it takes to keep things going on a weekly basis.
A little backstory: I started my Instagram account in the Winter of 2014. I didn't start posting on it regularly until the Summer of 2015 when I was 17 weeks pregnant. By March of 2016 I had over 10k followers on Instagram and that's when I decided to launch Love & LaRock (the blog). The first year of blogging was spotty and it took me a long time to find my groove with blogging. However, since January of 2017 Brittany (the photographer I work with) and I committed to shooting more often to see if we could get this thing off the ground. It's been a long, arduous road to get to where we are, and we still have significant goals ahead of us, but I couldn't be more proud of where we are today.
To track my time and not go completely insane doing it, I divided up my weekly duties into five categories:
1. Managerial: This category consists of writing emails; uploading/organizing photos; doing my editorial calendar; applying for campaigns on social media platforms/doing outreach to brands; reading and negotiating contracts; invoicing, and conference calls with potential brands.
2. Building Content: This category highlights the time that I spend creating outlines of the products we need to shoot that week; styling the shoots (shopping for props, organizing the outfits/products and setting up the scene to shoot in, a.k.a. cleaning my house); taking photos; and editing (which Brittany does the majority of, but I also take pictures on our off days and do all the editing for those).
3. Instagram: This is all things regarding the app from posting, responding to comments + direct messages; organizing my hashtag list/finding new hashtags to try; commenting on other people's accounts.
4. Blog: This entails brainstorming, writing, editing and scheduling posts; publishing posts; and managing/upgrading features on my website.
5. Other: This accounts for extraneous things that I do like pinning to Pinterest, posting to Facebook and other random odds and ends.
Percentage of Time Spent Managing My Social Media Business
In one week I spent 33 hours working on Love & LaRock.
It was fascinating how the majority of my time (30%) was spent on the managerial side of things (which is NOT my strong suit) and not on the creative pieces (which is why I got into this in the first place). I hate to admit this, but I must have 100 emails that I still haven't responded to, and I just don't know how it will ever be feasible for me to get through them.
I focus more of my time on Instagram (23%) in comparison to the time I spend on other social channels. While the blog is moving along and gaining more views each month, I generate most of the income that we make off of social media posts on Instagram. Also, I find that it's easiest to connect with others on the Instagram app than through the blog, so that's where I find myself spending a lot of time responding to comments, answering direct messages and commenting on others' feeds.
Building content takes a lot more time than I think people realize, taking up 27% of my week. Brittany and I usually shoot together once a week. She comes over after nap time around 2 PM, and we shoot with Winter until around 4:00 PM or 4:30 PM (with lots of breaks of course!). I am trying hard to dip my toes into the fashion scene, so after, we typically spend another hour to two hours shooting just me. Another vast bulk of my time is spent on styling shoots which entails thinking of campaign concepts, shopping for necessary items/props and decorating or cleaning the house.
I am going to try to figure out a way to spend less time on the managerial side of things and more time connecting with others. I hate that I have so many unread/not responded to comments and emails :(
Please let me know what you think about this post. I would love to hear your thoughts and insights on it all.
