đ The Weekly Scroll: Inconvenient? Do it anyway
A playbook for when life refuses to cooperate with your content calendar.
This year, the Buffer retreat happened without me. So did all the other activities I had planned before, during, and after the retreat, too. The reason isnât too complicated: my visa didnât come through in time. But my feelings about it were very complex.
Like any good creator, I had tons of content planned for the two weeks Iâd be traveling. There was team content to contribute to, personal content outlined in my notes, and a whole plan for how I could squeeze the most out of the trip creatively.
And then, I couldnât make it.
As the week went on, I realized I had a decision to make. I could mope around and wait for the bad feelings to pass before I dove back into content creation, or I could lean into my situation and make the most of it. I chose the second option, but only after spending a solid couple of days doing the first.
Your bad weeks might not look like mine â there are plenty of valid reasons to step away from content creation when life just isnât playing fair. But in case you do want to take option 2 and make the most of it, I want to share what worked for me when:
Today, I hope to give you a playbook for the times when:
it isnât convenient to create
your mind or body arenât agreeing with you
the timing of the thing youâd planned has fallen apart on you
Share whatâs been going on
For me, leaning into the moment and being a little vulnerable about it resonated with way more people than I expected. I got comments and DMs from people who, for one reason or another, had been waiting on a visa for everything from family weddings to job offers to a vacation theyâd been saving for. A few of them had been dealing with their situation quietly and were just grateful to see they werenât alone.
That small moment of misery was soothed by the number of people who were willing to commiserate. Iâm not saying you have to spill your whole life on the internet â but if something real is happening in your world, talking about it might land harder than pretending things are going exactly to plan.
Batch create when you have the capacity
I have never appreciated having b-roll saved in my phone more than I did over the past couple of weeks.
Ideas Iâd been sitting on for weeks finally got their time in the spotlight. I pulled text posts from old notes Iâd never fully fleshed out, repurposed clips Iâd shot for one reason and used them for another, and whipped up a few simple videos that wouldnât have happened if I hadnât been hoarding raw material in the first place. The version of me from three weeks prior, mindlessly filming a five-second clip on a walk, basically rescued my content week.
If you take one thing from this issue, let it be this: the boring archive work you do when you have capacity might be what saves you when you donât.
The case for not posting at all
Itâs perfectly OK to have seasons where you just canât do it. The nature of social media might make it feel like not posting spells doom for your presence, but I donât agree.
Prioritizing your health, be it physical, mental, emotional, whichever, is never the wrong call. The audience thatâs actually built for the long haul will be there when you come back. And if youâd rather show up depleted than miss a posting day, thatâs worth examining on its own.
A missed week isnât the end of your creator career, but a year of burnout might be.
None of this is groundbreaking, but itâs all about the mindset.
On the other side of all this, some genuinely nice things have cropped up. A creator agency reached out based on one of my posts during the week-that-shall-not-be-named for a LinkedIn brand partnership thatâs live now. I got permission to post it to Instagram, too, which technically makes it my first Instagram brand partnership. And I hit 2,500 followers on Instagram in the middle of all of it â halfway to my goal of 5,000 by the end of June (you can read more about that here).
And I still wish I had made it on the trip. I know the content wouldâve been fire, and I missed all the people I didnât get to see. But I also had the opportunity to bring people into the fold and create some great content.
SAVE YOUR IDEAS IN BUFFER
The reason I had an archive to pull from is that I keep all my random ideas in one place: Buffer. The Create space holds everything from shower thoughts to fully fleshed-out brainwaves, and on a week like this one, thatâs the difference between posting and ghosting.
WHATâS IN MY SCROLL?
As you can probably imagine, I had a lot of time to spend scrolling while waiting and trying to cheer myself up. Luckily, the content in my feed was so good that it (almost) made up for, well, everything else.
One of the top-tier things I saw this week was from Kirsti, fellow Senior Content Creator here at Buffer, on YouTube: the best time to post on, you guessed it, YouTube.
We also have a couple more âbest time to postâ updates for Instagram and TikTok up on the blog.
Instagram launched Instants globally, an app to share candid moments. Something about this seems familiar, but I canât quite put my finger on what it is â can you đ ? IG is also testing the option to set different captions for each slide of a carousel. Can you imagine the potential for photo dumps? And also other serious business scenarios? But mostly photo dumps?
LinkedIn is testing a feature that lets consultants take appointments directly in the platform. Who wants a 30-minute chat with me?
Until next week,
Tami
Sr. Content Creator