Many of us now use our smartphone for pretty much everything. We check our emails, update social media, watch videos, listen to music and oh yes, occasionally we make a call.

However, having all of this technology at our fingertips, and particularly social media, has one downside – namely the speed at which our batteries drain.

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Why is social media having this effect?

 

There is no doubt that in the 21^st century we are a more mobile, fast paced society. We have gone from being tied to a landline, then to a desktop computer and now we can run our lives and our businesses from anywhere in the world, from a device small enough to fit into our pocket.

For the average person their use of social media on the move can be intensive enough, but for someone who is also running a business from their smartphone, the demands on the battery will be even higher.

A business owner will often update multiple social media profiles at least two to three times a day, as well as checking in with comments and questions from potential clients.

A quick tip for any entrepreneur, to help you to spend less time on your smartphone searching around the web for all the individual pieces of information, is to head to this handy cheat sheet from The Pink Group. This guide includes all the image sizes and information you need to brand your social media profiles on the move.

Extending your battery life

 

There are some simple steps you can take to extend your smart phone’s battery life, so it lasts longer on a single charge and Cheeky Munkey offers a helpful guide to implementing these on the iPhone.

There are also several measures you can take, related to social media itself, so that the time you need to take actually updating from your smartphone will be less, and your battery will last longer.

• Stick to a Schedule: Social media can take up a large amount of time and it’s easy to fire up your Facebook app, supposedly for a few minutes, and then find yourself still there an hour and a half later. Instead allow yourself three half hour sessions a day, for all social media, and don’t allow yourself to cheat. Work out what times of day are best for you to check your profiles and then use this as downtime, between more intensive work.

• Collect Content: Writing content to feed to social media is time intensive, so make sure you are continually gathering ideas and save them. This will allow you to quickly access the information and write a status update.

• Schedule Posts: If you are limiting yourself to only using social media during certain parts of the day, it’s a good idea to use some of this time to schedule posts to go out around the clock. Tools like Buffer and Tweetdeck are great for this, or you can even schedule Facebook posts direct from your page. However, don’t rely solely on this; you still need to interact with people and to maintain a live presence on your social profiles.

• Combine Your Efforts: Tools are also available to let you view all your social media accounts from one dashboard. Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are two examples. This allows you to check your own profiles from one location and to also easily monitor your key clients, competitors and media contacts, to see if there is any hot news you need to know.

There is no doubt that using social media on the move from your smartphone does have an impact on battery life.

Take steps therefore, to limit this where you can. However, technology is always evolving and you can be assured that the smartphone manufacturers will be working on this issue.

The innovations they make in their hardware over the coming years will soon extend battery life and make it a match for our love of apps.