Social Media Strategy
How Much Time Does Social Media Take?
Jun 24 2015
People often ask me how much time social media takes. Last week I did a media interview and a webinar, and the question came up both times….
It is a good question – especially because businesses need to optimize resources, and small businesses must determine how much time they can afford to spend on something like social media.
The answer is – it depends on the size/scale of your business and organization, but here are some general guidelines. There are 3 stages you should go through to get started in social media, and each stage will take a different amount of time.
Before you launch that Facebook Page or Twitter account, spend some time educating yourself and learning about social media.
Time Investment: 1 – 2 hours a week for 1 – 3 months.
Next, build your social media channels. When you get started you’ll need to build your strategy, create your account and build an audience (plus you’ll need to be posting regularly).
Building naturally takes more time than maintenance because you are getting started. In addition to creating and launching you’ll need to build your audience, plus test and optimize your content to see what your audience likes.
Time Investment: This depends on the size of your organization and business. It can take anywhere from 1 – 6 months.
Finally you are in maintenance mode and you can expect to spend less time on your social network execution! Congratulations. The key here is content & community.
Time Investment: This depends on the size of your business and following – large companies need multiple full-time community managers just to keep up with content. Generally for a small or medium business you can expect to spend 1 – 3 hours a week (depending on media creation, etc).
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Great post and what I find is that social media is a full time job. The larger you network grows the more time it requires if engagement is your goal. Creating great content, finding and curating great content, responding to questions and comments, being social by supporting and engaging with other peoples content in Facebook groups, Google+ communities, and LinkedIn groups for me is extremely time consuming, but all part of social selling.