Instagram Quest 2018: Three Tips to Handle Anxiety and Fatigue While Doing Instagram Marketing

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Status Update: +3 Followers

Progress From Start: +66

Slow and Steady! I am seeing more consistent engagement in the last three days, another good development.

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Instagram marketing is amazing and useful and accessible. The only problem is, it stresses a ton of people out.

You create your content, you work hard to engage with other brands and reach out to like-minded creators, you engage with the comments, you put in the work, you do the time. Then you face confusion, doubt, and rejection… with occasional moments of glory, seemingly random, impossible to predict.

This is a recipe for stress. All the more so if you are compulsively checking your posts for new likes and comments.

There are a few ways you can completely redefine your relationship to Instagram. This post offers three tricks that I use to keep it under control, without sacrificing any of my ability to hustle and crush it.

(1) Only Check Instagram 1-2 Times Per Day

This is simple and extraordinarily difficult for most social media addicts.

If you are posting 1-2 times per day on Instagram… only check the app when you post. That’s simple, right? You literally never open the app unless you are posting some content. Whenever you do that, you’ll have a minute to look at the data and respond to comments.

This is one way to treat Instagram more like a job and less like a casual hobby. You wouldn’t drive to work ten times a day to check on your assignments- why load up Instagram so often when you are off the clock?

(2) Don’t Have Fun on Instagram

I think the ways you can have fun on Instagram as a consumer are the opposite of the ways you can succeed as a creator.

It’s fun to scroll around, watch videos, and go down the rabbit holes. You end up ten hashtags deep on a quest to find cool guitar videos or origami lessons or travel blogs about Missouri, whatever your thing is that day. It’s all good.

It’s productive on the other hand, to scroll for 2 hours through a bunch of hashtags you find extremely boring, but which happen to match your data for your target demographic, and just leave comments. Genuinely engaging with posts you don’t actually care about and stuff like that.

Eventually you overcome all that and it becomes fun again, because you spend most of your time engaging with your huge fanbase that leaves zillions of comments on all of your posts. But early on, accept that it won’t be a lot of fun for most of the “grind” part.

(3) There is No Time to Think - Make Posts, You Dummy

Instagram does not reward you for sitting around and being a philosopher. Nobody gives one half of a fuck.

If you spend more than 30 minutes thinking about your next piece of content, you are probably overthinking it. Try not to be romantic about it, instead look at what works for other people and do your own version of it.

I’ve never seen a platform that rewards thinking LESS than Instagram. It’s not about thinking. As soon as you know your niche / theme, all you do is ask yourself: Whats the coolest thing I can make in the next [x] minutes? And then you immediately make that thing.

Try thinking less (and doing more) for a week with Instagram content and see what happens. This is not easy to quantify, but if you do it, I suspect you’ll see some cool stuff happen.

Final Thoughts

Anxiety on Instagram is normal. I’d be shocked if anybody doesn’t experience at least some stress when they start marketing on Instagram. It takes time to learn how to fit this stuff into your life.

With that said, your future as a content creator or musician depends on conquering this issue. There’s no way around this problem other than going directly through it. You sit with the stress, you feel it, you learn from it, and over the course of a few months you learn how eliminate the stress while maintaining the marketing campaign.

I hope that the three tactics from this guide will help. They’re my best advice based on my first month of serious Instagram work.

How do you manage social media related stress, on Instagram or Steem or anywhere?