Currently the founder and creative director of Tonnessen Studio, a social media, marketing, and content agency. She specializes in social media, content creation, brand marketing, email marketing and website development.

Previously the brand director of Schumacher and worked with Ralph Lauren and Sotheby’s International Realty.

4 Steps on Controlling the social media creep: 

How to keep from getting pulled into social media and looking up after you have wasted hours of your day. Part of it is discipline. The other part is staying organized and knowing the goals for your business.

1. Goal Setting – Identify your social media goals.

This is important. There are 2 types of goals on social media.

• Branding Goal: ensure your brand perception on social media is just as elevated as your website and portfolio.

What you need: high quality content, consistent but not  constant pushing 

• Client Acquisition Goal: You want to grow your business and are looking for qualified leads through social media. 

What you need: consistent and regular posting 4x or more a week, use a mix of paid and organic social posting

Honing in on the right platform is key! 

IG: Used for very visual content.
Most common with Millennials and Gen Z.
Pinterest: A search driven platform of Gen Z, Millennial and Gen X.
TikTok: The fastest growing platform with a user base made of younger Millennial and Gen Z.
Facebook: An older skewing platform focusing on older
Millennial and Gen X.
YouTube: The leading long form content.

2. Getting Organized – Plan 

• Start with your content. – Make sure your images and videos are all in one place and labeled by project. Use shared drive tools and high resolution images.

• Build out your notes by using a shared notes platform. Chart the photographer, stylist, architect, interior designer, landscape designer and brands featured for each project. 

The Importance of a brand aligned landing page on IG: 

If you’re active on IG, more people are landing on your IG profile than on your website. It needs to align with your branding. Plan your grid. 

3. Maximizing Efficiency – Tools to help 

Recommended tools: 

• Later – great for IG and Facebook management to create, edit and schedule posts 

• Dropbox – can be used seamlessly to share images and video between your team. 

• Google Sheets – perfect tool for organizing source and credit tags for client posts 

• Tailwind – a tool for planning and scheduling out Pinterest Pins. It helps you stay organized and will recommend the best posting cadence. 

4. Maintaining Balance – Set a schedule and stick to your goals. 

• Schedule time and block it off on your calendar so you can work on your social media post planning ahead. The only exception is for timely IG stories – share what’s inspiring you at the moment. Be organic. It does not have to be perfect.

• Don’t forget to ENGAGE! Engage with your followers and the accounts you follow for 30-45 minutes every day. You can break this into two sessions if you want. Comment on other followers’ posts helps to grow your engagement. Don’t do this several times  throughout the day. That is when you feel overwhelmed like you are allowing it to take over your day. 

• Let your content work for you. If you are prioritizing IG, take the beautiful content you planned and repurpose it on your other platforms. Use it again. Pay attention to how your audience is engaging with your content and how your audience’s preferences may vary from platform to platform.

Responses to Comments & Questions: 

• Paid advertising versus organic reach. Anything that looks like an ad will not perform well. Anything that performs well organically will perform well as an ad. Use what is working best for you organically and that will be the best paid ad. 

• Reels are great to grow reach through IG. IG prioritizes reels that are created through IG. We have used Final Cut before as well when creating our reels. 

• Is it important to hop on IG trends or stay true to your branding? We recommend using your brand as the most important lens to create your content. Don’t use trending audio just because it is trending, it needs to be a brand fit first and foremost, not just a trend. 

• When you see an audio you like, save it in your IG so you can use it in a reel later. If the audio is not trending, it is totally fine. 

• When creating reels, snackable sized content is a good thing. It is ok to break a long video into several small reels and use that. It does not have to be a big production every time and very short videos are very effective and easy for the viewer to digest. 

• Partner with other larger accounts or peer level accounts to get in front of their audience. This helps with growth.