Ever heard someone say they don’t have time for social media?
From Instagram Stories to YouTube Live to IGTV – in 2019, maintaining your social media feeds can feel like a full-time job.
And for some, it is.
For social media creators like Lucie Fink, Patrick Janelle and Jennifer Lake, one Instagram timeline post can take between a few minutes – to a few months to produce.
From scouting locations to researching hashtags to working (and often re-working) captions with brand partners, creators are putting countless hours of unseen work into posts that their followers may only spend a few seconds interacting with.
“Being inspired by a scene or a moment, [I can have] a post up in ten or fifteen minutes,” says Janelle, whose Instagram account @aguynamedpatrick boasts 431K followers and features a blend of travel and lifestyle images.
“In other cases, a post could take days or weeks of planning,” Janelle says.
Lake, who blogs about about fashion and travel under the moniker Style Charade while also balancing a full-time job in public relations – cites a laundry list of tasks to complete before she even gets the shot, from outfit selection and styling to logistics like renting a car and props – or chasing daylight.
“Let's be honest, direct overhead sunlight at high noon isn't very flattering on anybody,” Lake says.
“As such, we time our [shoots] to coincide with when the lighting would be most optimal.”
And if you think the work is done when the photo is shot, think again.
“I spend about 2-3 hours per day on Instagram,” says Fink, who focuses on health and wellness under her eponymous channels.
Fink says most of this time is spent replying to direct messages and comments, but because YouTube is her primary channel of focus, she also spends significant time producing and editing videos for that channel.
“It's easy to see a final YouTube video and to think that it looks so simple,” says Fink, who has been creating content for 10 years.
“But the actual act of putting a video together from start to finish is a full-on process that has taken me years to master.”
Janelle, who has been creating content for five years, says that sponsored posts often require additional pre-publishing steps, including building creative briefs, reviewing contracts with a lawyer and participating in brand planning calls.
And Fink's sponsored post communications can get pretty detail-oriented.
“Sometimes, [a sponsored post] involves telling [a brand] exactly where I'll be taking the photo/video, what outfit I'm going to be wearing in it, how much or how little makeup will be on my face, what color my nails will be, or how the product will be featured in the content,” she says.
Fink explains that she does this because each brand has their own guidelines.
“If they're paying for a piece of content, they want to make sure it adheres to all of their rules and regulations."
But Fink will be the first to admit that more time invested doesn’t always guarantee more engagement.
“Sometimes I work very hard on a post, but it doesn't perform well, and other times a post comes to me very easily… and it does extremely well,” she says.
On Janelle’s channels, he notes that a highly composed or styled image does not perform as well as "something that feels a little more off the cuff."
“I spend, on average, two to three hours per day [on Instagram],” Janelle says.
“But if I felt like I were always doing my job well, that time would easily be doubled or tripled.”
