Tips for Blog and Social Media Maintenance While on Vacation? Get Out of Town!

Blog and social media maintenance can’t fall through the cracks when you go on vacation. Let the plants die and newspapers stack up if you must, but make sure you don’t neglect your blog and social media platforms; they need to continue providing the quality content that your clients/customers/fans have (hopefully) come to expect.

Have a Blog in the Bag

A successful blog keeps readers engaged and ever-hungry for more content. Readers should be so excited for your posts that they check your blog regularly for content, but that will only happen if you’re a consistent and frequent poster.

As a point of reference, we post four times a week on the Bruce Clay blog. If you don’t have the resources for such frequent posting, however, you should — at least — be updating your blog once a week, and each post should be a minimum of 400 words.

Just because you’re going on vacation doesn’t mean your blog can go on hiatus. Your readers expect your posts and you can’t disappoint them. Therefore, it is essential that you find the time to prepare and schedule a blog post ahead of time. Another option (which will also theoretically save you time and boost engagement) is to invite a trusted colleague or peer to guest post on your blog. If you go that route, however, make sure the deadline for their post is before you vacate, so that you can do whatever editing you need to do beforehand.

Prep and Optimize Social Media! #necessary #simple @Tweriod @BufferApp

You don’t want your brand voice to fall silent while you’re away, so set aside some to time to craft and schedule social media posts before you vacate. Tweets, Facebook posts and LinkedIn posts should be distributed throughout each day. Follow these steps to optimal social media posting (which can be used even when you’re not on vacation).

1. Strategize your share times with Tweriod. Tweriod is a free service that analyzes your Twitter following to determine what the optimal times of the day are for you to tweet. After it gives you the times for your Twitter account, click on “Send to Buffer.”

2. Log into Buffer. Buffer is an amazing dashboard that automatically pulls the data from Tweriod and knows the times you should be tweeting (see right). Buffer will then present you with a list of suggested times for you post social media. Buffer allows you to connect with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

3. Create your posts in Buffer. So for example, if I were going to be out of the office Monday through Wednesday and wanted to send out four social media postings per day on Twitter, I would simply stick with the schedule Tweriod designated — which Buffer also defaults to, conveniently.

Now, I would just have to come up with 12 tweets in total. Stumped for what to tweet about? Consider these types of tweets when planning:

• A picture
• A retweet
• A great quote from someone in your industry
• A deal or discount your brand offers
• A link to a helpful article that can benefit your customers or clients
• A link to an awesome related infographic related to your industry
• A link that announces your blog post, corresponding to the time you scheduled your blog to go live

4. Want to share across social media platforms? When creating a post, simply click the icon for your Facebook, the icon for your Twitter and the icon for your LinkedIn and everything will post simultaneously at your designated times.

5. Simply click and drag to change the order of your tweets. To change the time (which default according to Tweriod’s analytics), just click the clock.

Designate Time to Check In

By scheduling your tweets and Facebook, LinkedIn and blog posts, you’ve completed 95% of the work you needed to do. But part of staying in constant contact is being there to answer questions and comments that users post on your various channels. Therefore, it’s a good idea to set aside a certain amount of time (for example, half an hour a day in the morning before you start the day) to check in and respond to anything that needs a response. And if a customer has a question or concern that is going to need a lot of attention, respond letting them know you’re out of the office, but his or her concern is important and you’ll get back to them next week. It’s just a matter of communication, and that’s what social media thrives on.  

Kristi Kellogg is a journalist, news hound, professional copywriter, and social (media) butterfly. Currently, she is a senior SEO content writer for Conde Nast. Her articles appear in newspapers, magazines, across the Internet and in books such as "Content Marketing Strategies for Professionals" and "The Media Relations Guidebook." Formerly, she was the social media editor at Bruce Clay Inc.

See Kristi's author page for links to connect on social media.