I was having lunch with my friend and co-worker, Phil Buckley and his friend Jake on Monday. At some point in the conversation, it came up that I had a site of my own–this blog–and Jake asked what I do with it.

The answer is, I don’t do that much. I used to, but I don’t anymore. What changed? I got a full-time job in social media. One that isn’t just an internship, where part of my job is building my online brand. One where I do social media for clients, and write posts about social media for my company’s blog.

Why is it that when you’re doing social media for a company, it’s so hard to keep up with your personal brand? I think it has to do with more than time, although that is a main factor. So what else is it? I have some ideas.

Social media has become more work.

I am learning that there is a lot of work that goes into successful social media. Things like SEO, and monitoring and response. It’s not just publishing a post or responding to a comment, like I can do on my own blog and social networking platforms. There has to be strategy and proactive steps like tracking. These things are astronomically helpful, but they take time.

When I write a post for a client, I need to ensure that keywords are optimized, track all embedded links, and then track the links I put in Facebook posts and tweets when I go to publicize the post. These are all very important for reporting and ROI, but they add maybe a half hour to the production of each post.

Now when I go to write a post for myself, I feel like I should be doing the same for my own blog. That seems like a larger undertaking when I’m not getting paid for it and after a full day’s work.

My good ideas go to the company blog.

Some of the content I used to put on my blog is now going on my company’s blog. When I go to an event, I’m now live blogging or recapping for work instead of for myself. Yesterday, I wrote a post about a tool I recently learned about. Normally I would put that on my own blog, but we needed content for the company blog so I put it there.

When a good chunk of the content I used to have in mind for my own brand goes into my company’s brand instead–and when that’s paired with less time to read and research more content–my personal brand starts to become a content wasteland.

I’m sure there are more, but I’ll stop there.

Does anybody else have this dilemma? What about your full-time social media job keeps you from keeping up with your personal brand? What do you do to overcome that?

Photo by Maria Reyes-McDavis