What is Social Media Burnout? How It’s Affecting Your Business and 10 Ways to Best Handle It

Do you run, depend, or use social media for your business? If so, you must know about Social Media Burnout and the harmful effect it has.

Everyone is on their phones 24/7. It’s hard not to stay connected nowadays, especially when you are trying to run a business. Almost every company out there has a social media account to stay in touch with their customers and grow their business. So what happens when you are constantly checking up on your social accounts and worrying about how it’s doing? You get burnt out.

What is Social Media Burnout?

If you find yourself constantly on social media, refreshing your feed, and seeing a decrease in engagement on your content…take a step back. You’ve got social media burnout.

Over-engaging has a worse effect than under engaging. Why? Because too quick of actions can cause you to be blocked on certain social media websites.

Take Instagram for example. According to an article by Moblivious, you can be shadow or soft banned on the platform for liking more than 350 posts an hour. You might think to yourself, “There’s no way I’m liking more than 350 posts an hour”, but when you get caught up in the funnel, how can you be certain?

Another sure sign of social media burnout is a decrease in stats. If your likes, comments, engagement rate, etc. have decreased over the past few weeks, you need to take a break to assess the situation.

Step back, and look at everything you have done in the past few weeks. When did your engagement rate/likes/comments, etc. decrease? What do your stats look like? Do you think it has to do with the content you’ve been posting? Or the timing you’ve been posting your content? –These are great questions to ask yourself if you have seen a significant decrease in engagement.

Navigating through these questions allows you to fully assess the situation, and realize that social media burnout is affecting the way your company’s account is being run.

How It’s Affecting Your Business:

A decline in social media engagement can be critical, especially if your sales heavily rely on social platforms. Once Instagram has flagged your account or prevented you from engaging, it is a tell-tale sign that you need to slow down or stop.

People are no longer seeing your posts, which means whatever you are saying is not being heard. If you have a new product announcement, maybe 1/4th of your loyal followers are only seeing that post.

It can also be the content you have been posting. Take a look at the content on your account to find out when your engagement began to decline. Identify what it is about those posts that could have been the beginning of your downfall. Once you do so, you need to start creating a new strategy.


Social media burnout is preventable. Avoid overusing social media, reevaluate your social media accounts every week and make sure to check your analytics. Every once in a while, take a step back to see the bigger picture of what you are doing. Make sure everything aligns with your business and is good enough to keep up with your competitors. Talk with your team to make sure everything is aligning properly.

Rhamer Bernardez is a contributing editor and marketing associate for Newswire. She comes from a journalistic and PR background, covering everything from best practices in the field to social media strategy. Have an idea for a blog post? Don't hesitate to email Rhamer at: rhamer@newswire.com

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