Are you drowning in social media? Having trouble finding time to “do it all”? Stop! Do not stress yourself over something so crazy. I’m giving you permission to step back and take a break.

Finding time to balance it all is difficult. You need to keep learning about your industry, you need to keep in touch and reach out to clients. If you aren’t careful these two simple acts can consume your entire day leaving you no time to run your business. Isn’t that the reason you have these accounts anyway?! If you’re stressed and worn down, how can you run your business?

Set up your profiles and optimize them. You don’t need to have an account on every social media site. Find the ones most relevant to your industry and get your profile set up. For most people, that will be Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Turn off almost all notifications, get rid of those distracting emails you get each time someone comments on your status on Facebook or G+. The only notification you need is when someone contacts you with a private or direct message. Those are the ones you want to get and respond to right away. Everything else can wait.

Now, make a schedule and stick to it. Allow yourself a 10-20 minutes per day to hop on and be active on these networks. Or, cycle through them concentrating on one each day. So, you might miss a posting or two. It’s ok. You don’t have time to read and respond to everything. No one expects you to read it all. That’s why you must be posting links to blog posts more than once (different times and different days).

You’re thinking “Hey, I want to look active throughout the day on Facebook/Twitter.” No problem, use a service like Tweetdeck, Buffer or Hootsuite and schedule your posts and retweets. But, really, there is nothing wrong with only doing your Twittering in the evening while watching tv with your husband (guilty!). Who really cares?! Stop watching the time stamps.

My personal routine- I am on Facebook throughout the day, everyday. I keep in touch with family members, follow a few people that I enjoy learning from and keep up with my clients. I pop into Twitter only every few days, usually in the evening. I don’t do a lot of Twitter. I follow a few people I like to learn from and I retweet things occasionally. Ah, Google+, you and I are still defining our relationship. Google recommends that you be active every 72 hours. That’s every three days. That’s it. They aren’t expecting you to be there daily. My plan with G+ is to pop in every few days. And that is OK.

Your blog posts should be automatically posting to social networks. If they aren’t, let’s talk. Previously auto-posting to G+ has been next to impossible, but there are a few plugins recently that should take care of this. I’ll be testing those in the next few weeks. (Wanna be a test subject? No charge to install and configure, I just want your feedback!)

So there you go, starting right now, you have permission to slack off! Create a plan and stop knocking yourself out trying to keep up with everything, you have a business to run!