With today being Labor Day in the United States, many workers have the day off. What about your blog and other social networking tools? If you’re in the habit of producing content or doing outreach on a daily basis, do you take the day off for the holiday? If you’re not in the habit of producing daily content, this probably isn’t an issue… but if you make social networking part of your daily activities, there are three options when it comes to holidays:
Act as if it’s Not a Holiday
This option is pretty simple: keep on writing, tweeting, and networking just like it were any other day. The only challenge is that it means that you don’t get any sort of break or day off. If we talk about holidays such as Christmas, you might wonder if you really want to be spending time blogging or writing on Facebook on those days.
Take the Day Off
Take a holiday! That’s what the Kelby Media Group is doing. If folks are expecting daily content you should give them a heads up that you’ll be taking the day off. I can guarantee that you’re not going to catch much grief for taking the occasional day off to enjoy a break.
Produce Scheduled Content
Even though you might be taking a day off, your blog system doesn’t have to. WordPress, Blogger, and other major blog platforms make it simple to write posts and then schedule them for the future. I use this technique extensively on a few websites even when it’s not a holiday. If your content isn’t time-sensitive, it can be written ahead of time, scheduled to be published during the holiday, and you’ll still get to take a day off. The one caveat is that hopefully you can check in occasionally to follow up on comments or reactions.
Overall, holidays shouldn’t be a problem for someone using social media. There are a variety of options for dealing with holidays; pick one and go for it!
Photo by ahisgett, used under Creative Commons licensing
These other posts might be of interest to you:
- Future Blog Content: Schedule Your Posts
- Social Photo Podcast #4: What to Tweet, Holiday Gifts, Upcoming Poll on Workflow
- Steps in Launching a Blog: Talking About Social Photo Talk
Tagged as:
blogging,
holidays,
scheduled posts
What can you do when you want to keep fresh content on a blog but you know you won’t be able to write? You can write your content in advance and then schedule the posts. WordPress, Blogger, and other major blog platforms offer the ability to schedule posts for future publication. Write up your post as usual, but instead of publishing it immediate, schedule it for a future date or time. I briefly talked about this technique when I wrote about whether or not to blog on holidays.