How Much Time Should You Spend on Social Media for Your Business?

You know social media is beneficial to your business and you know you need to be involved with your online communities regularly, but it’s easy to sucked in and find yourself spending large amounts of time on these sites without feeling like you’re actually accomplishing anything. So, how much time should you really be spending on Facebook, Twitter and blogging?

When you first get involved with these activities, it will almost certainly take you longer than people who have been on it for a while. Once you get over the learning curve and learn some tricks and tools to speed up your processes, things will begin to fall into place and you’ll start connecting with the right people and possibly scoring some leads. But even once you get to this point, social media can be a time killer.

People in the social media community have varying opinions about how much time businesses should spend engaging their communities. Included in regular social media tasks are things such as responding to messages, scheduling posts, reading and commenting on blogs, writing content and analyzing your results.

Here are a few respected opinions about how time should be allotted to these tasks (but know that your schedule and requirements will differ depending on your social media goals.)

  • A social media expert Chris Brogan says that most businesses will need to spend two hours per day involved with social media.
  • Another social media professional, Laura Roeder, believes that businesses can be successful by spending 10 minutes on Twitter per day two times, which would mean 20 minutes per day. Of course, this doesn’t take into account other social media accounts.
  • Writing for Gigaom, digital strategist Aliza Sherman, says, “you don’t need to spend hours a day on Twitter or Facebook or the like to be effective in your efforts.” Although her post is a little dated, her chart can help you think about your social media efforts.

The 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report released earlier this year showed that people who spend at least six hours per week on social media are almost twice as likely to see leads generated than those who spend five or fewer hours. The people who released the report also mentioned that benefits for businesses greatly increased at the 11 hour mark.

If you’re looking for time-saving social media strategies for your business, you should consider attending the SoCon 12 session by Steve Miller called “Why Time Consuming Blogging, Twitter and Facebook Strategies May NOT Work for Your Business: Consider These Alternative Social Media Strategies.” He will present less time intensive, alternative social media strategies, using case studies from low profile authors.

And if you haven’t already, go ahead and register now so you don’t miss this and other great conference sessions.

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