Social media is an important part of every photographer and artist’s career management. It’s a fantastic way to promote your work, connect with your audience and, if we’re being honest, keep up with friends and family. It’s hard to keep social media from taking over your life–especially when it seems like there’s a new network popping up every couple of weeks! You’ve heard of Ello, right?

We’ve talked before on this site about maintaining a proper work-life balance when it comes to spending time on social media. Today we’re going to spend some time exploring the idea of how much social media is too much from an entrepreneurial and promotional point of view.

Is Too Much Visibility Really a Bad Thing?

It’s understandable that you want to secure your company’s name on all of the different social media networks. It prevents imposters from pretending to be you and sending the wrong messages out into the void. Securing user names is an important part of your reputation management. At the same time, just because you’ve opened an account on a social media network doesn’t mean that you have to find a way to work it into your regularly scheduled promotional plan. That could lead to an oversaturation of your message and–as everybody remembers during election season–too much marketing can actually dilute or actively work against you.  Pick a few of the networks that are most relevant to your venture and concentrate on them.

Keeping Your Information Safe

Another thing that you have to keep in mind is that each network you join represents a potential security breach. As Trend Micro points out, “For every door that opens on the Internet, there’s usually a “key” to open that door—in other words, a combination of username and password. And behind each door is all kinds of personal information about you.” Plus: the more user accounts you have the more logins you have to remember and the more passwords you have to create. You do know that using the same password everywhere is a bad idea, right? A good password manager can help with this. It’s also a good idea to enable two-factor identification on every service you use (that offers it).

Time Time Time

One thing that you already know is that managing a social media account properly takes a lot of time. There is more to good social media marketing than simply publishing promotional posts every morning. You have to interact with your audience on and off your profiles and feeds. Managing just one or two social media accounts can take hours of your time every day. It’s why some photographers and artists will hire help to manage their social media accounts full time. If that’s true when you have just one or two accounts, imagine the time it will take to properly manage four, five or more accounts! That is time that you could be spending on other incredibly aspects of building your business like working with clients, managing your books, etc.

Sure you can schedule things ahead of time but the last thing you want is to set everything completely to auto pilot. The last thing you want is to be that person–the person who accidentally posts promotional stuff during emergencies or crises.

So What Are You Supposed to Do?

Pick, at most, four social networks on which to focus the majority of your attention. Typically, in our field, those networks are Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Facebook. There are, of course, other social networks out there that are deserving of your time but for now, it’s important to go where the people are. You don’t have to abandon the others completely. You just need to save the specialty networks for breaks in your schedule or unexpected downtime. This is particularly true for networks that are still in beta (like Ello).

Remember: there is such a thing as too much marketing. Instead of trying to be everywhere at once all the time, make sure you’re exactly where you need to be when you need to be there. It’s a skill that will take time but once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you can be sure that your business will thrive.