Since
the rise of social media in recent years, companies have slowly been
coming to the realisation that it can actually be a very useful
marketing tool – especially in regards to customer relationship
management and brand awareness. There have been countless companies that
have now launched a social media presence – from well-known brands to
smaller start-up businesses – and each of these companies take the time to maintain it each day. But in that lies an important question: how much time is the right amount
to spend on your social media efforts? After all, it’s usually not a
directly measurable benefit to the company, so quantifying its worth can
be a difficult task.
Should you be getting social?
The first thing to ask yourself is, how much of your business
is sourced online? There are a great many businesses that now find the
vast majority of their new clients from the web, meaning that social
media can be a great place to find them. On the other hand, if your
company generally finds its new customers locally, via other forms of
advertising, or through word-of-mouth, you might find that investing in
web-based forms of promotion may not be so profitable. In terms of
social media, the latter group would probably not see a huge influx of
business from their social media presence, meaning that they shouldn’t
dedicate too much time to it. For the business that do find a
lot of their clients online, social media is an absolute must-have – and
the amount of time they should spend on it really varies. Remember that
posting a simple status update only takes a few moments, so even if you
don’t see the value in social media, it’s still worth updating it at
least once a week.
Know your audience
Another factor that will influence how much time you choose to spend
on social media is your industry and its target audience. For example, a
web-based company that provides search engine marketing probably has a
target client that spends a lot of time on the web – meaning they’re
likely to ‘Like’ or follow the company if given the offer. On the other
hand, a company that provides golf shoes to retirees may find that their
social media efforts are somewhat poorly received. This key distinction
should be made at an early stage so that no time is wasted. Of course,
there are some companies that are ‘on the fence’, or are unsure whether
or not social media will be worth the time investment; the only real
answer to this issue is to just have a go. Create a free profile on one
of the major networks, send some invites via email to your existing
client base, and see what the response is like. You never know, you
might be surprised at how well it goes down.
You get back what you put in
Finally, a big concern with regards to the time consumption of social
media is that it relies on quality content being distributed, either
via blog or directly on the social network. Some companies worry about
the amount of work and time that goes into writing a blog entry – but
this content really doesn’t need to be too long or involved. Even a
couple of hundred words as a company update will do the trick; or a few
photos of new products – or even a simple special offer. A good tip is
to keep your updates limited to general interest pieces in the early
stages, then slowly introduce promotional pieces. This way, your users
and followers won’t see you as being overly ‘spammy’ and will be more
likely to read your updates whenever they’re posted. One of the great
things about social media is how flexible it is, but you do get back
what you put in: remember this last point and you’ll be well placed to make a real success of your social media efforts.
https://blogs.monash.edu/presto/2012/04/02/pr-practitioners-its-time-to-put-your-social-media-hat-on/
http://www.louisfoong.com/lets-put-social-media-in-its-place/
http://blogs.opentext.com/vca/blog/1.11.647/article/1.26.1216/2011/10/17/Social_Business%3A_It%26%23039%3Bs_Time_to_Put_Social_Media_to_Work!
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