Social Media – How Much Time Should I Spend?

One of the biggest complaints I hear about Social Media from my clients is, it takes too much time. I do agree that it is possible to let Social Media consume too much of your time if you are not careful  so here is a list of a few things you can do to guard against the time suck that many people report

• Realize that for Social Media Marketing to work it must  be done intentionally. It should be part of your overall  marketing plan so you should decide before hand exactly how much time/money you wish to spend. Then stick to your plan
• Set a timer before you begin. Then stop when it goes off and move on to the next project. If you enjoy Social Media for pleasure be honest about that with yourself and schedule those sessions for non work times
• Automate as much as possible. There are many tasks that can be set up and handled automatically without losing the personal aspect of social media such as:

1. Tweetlater for scheduling repeating Tweets, automatically following people, and welcome messages
2. Twitterfeed for automatically announcing your blog posts
3. There are many WordPress plug-ins that will automatically Tweet your new blog posts
4. Ezinearticles will automatically tweet when your article is published
5. Twellow is a a quick way to vet new followers
6. Ping.fm will automatically post to whatever services you add to the account
7. You can hire a Virtual Assistant to take care of the Tweets, posts, and admin tasks that don’t require your voice

You do need to be careful though because the most important part of Social media is building a relationship so you don’t ever want to automate and delegate so much that you lose your voice.