It’s that special time of year again. The snow is falling. The lights are shining. And the social media manager is wondering if time off is ever possible.

Not giving a social media manager time off is a recipe for disaster. They will burn out and make a huge community management mistake that could cost your organization money. But it’s really hard to see that when you only have one person handling social media and don’t have the funds to add to the staff.

So how do you handle this? How can your social media manager get the time off they need to be able to do their job in the long-term?

Assess your community’s needs

Every community is different, so that means their needs are different. You’ve created a social media strategy based on those needs, and now it’s time to revisit that.

What level of moderation do they need? What are their content needs? Basically, what do they expect from you to keep things going during your time off?

This is not the time to be doing amazing social media. This is when you’re just trying to make sure you don’t fall off of everyone’s algorithm and staying in those all-important feeds. Assess what that will take, so you can make a plan for it.

Create content

When I took my maternity leave, my goal had been two weeks off with someone hired to do anything that came up. To get that amount of time, I obviously needed to get two weeks worth of content done.

That is a lot of work to get done, and I knew it wouldn’t happen if I waited until the last minute. And that’s why I also created a plan with my clients for working further ahead. Did it go over well? Most of my clients were enthusiastic about it. Even though we had a content plan that looked at three months, it had become harder and harder to create ahead of time. So they were excited to get back to working ahead instead of from behind. I only had one client have a problem with working ahead, and well… I wasn’t surprised. Disappointed but not surprised.

We took six months where we added a little bit more to our ready-to-go content. That way it wasn’t on us to create in a huge batch right away. And because of that, I mostly had a two week maternity leave (yes, I know that was ridiculously short and I have regrets, but that is a different conversation).

While you might not have six months to build up, you do have some time now to get ahead of the game before the holidays. If you were to add one more post to your workload every day, you’d be able to have some time away from content creation. Will you be able to take a full week off? Probably not, especially for those who work in nonprofit. But you can get some time off and that’s better than most social media managers get.

Moderation

The next step towards time off is to prepare the moderation aspect. You need to address this in two parts.

Comment filter moderation

You probably have some filters already set up to catch some of the spam comments. I would add more to capture any kind of comment that you do not want out in the wild. You can just have them hidden for now so that you can deal with them later without the commenter knowing anything happened. It is a bit sneaky but it will give you some wiggle room when it comes to doing your moderation duties. And when you are taking time off, every bit of wiggle room you can get matters.

Not sure what you should put in the filters? Start with all of the language you would hate to have on your page. And then start noticing what any spam or troll accounts are posting. Put any common words into the filter. Finally, any language that might trigger a pile on of comments onto your page should be added as well. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t reply to that last category. This is more about controlling the community response. Then you are not overwhelmed by too many unanswered comments when you come back.

Human eyes

Even if you have everything so locked down that it will be hard for anything to get through, make sure to schedule some human eyes on your accounts as well. If you don’t have anyone you trust, it can be as simple as asking co-workers to check the accounts and to text you if there are any comments you need to address immediately.

If I were working in-house, I would ask a few workers and set up a schedule to make sure the load is shared. That way, you can spread the work around while making sure the accounts are getting regular attention.

Even if you don’t mind checking the accounts from time to time, pick one day during the holiday season and do this. You will give yourself a full day off. You deserve to have some time where you are not thinking about work and are just enjoying your friends and family. Give yourself that gift.

Actually take the time off

When I took my maternity leave, I couldn’t actually do it. I spent time every day looking in to make sure everything was going smoothly. This was all while I was recovering from childbirth. It was so unhealthy, and I absolutely was not ready at all to come back because of this unhealthy behavior.

You’ve done the work to get here. Enjoy the time. Whether it’s a day or more, pretend like social media is not a part of who you are. Be a real person again. It will do so much good for you, and you’ll be ready to hit the ground running when you do come back. Otherwise, you’ll be in the same place you were when you took the time off and that’s a recipe for disaster in the long-term.

How do you prepare for time off as a social media manager?