Burnout

In the book "Social Media for Strategic Communication" Karen Freberg talks about the condition called burnout. She referred to it as social fatigue.It is a feeling of being emotionally overextended and exhausted by one's work. In creators or social media influencers it is manifested in the form of lack of interaction with their followers, feeling too psychologically or physically drained to produce more content or feeling unmotivated due to lack of response on part of the followers.

This takes me back to what Guy Kawasaki talked about in "The Art of Social Media." He talked about how feeding the content monster can be a difficult task. He used the word monster in order to show the lack of satisfaction and profound need to feed it. But he mostly focused on running out of things to write about but burnout also touches the physical and psychological aspects of being a content creator either for one's own self or for a company.

I have personally been a victim to burnout. I started my blog as a form of catharsis. I would write about things that I usually wrote in my diary but as my followers started growing I felt pressured to write for them instead of me and at one point I was so exhausted that I gave up on my blog for months.

picture credits: Technology Therapy