Social Media Time Management – NOT 10 mins. a day!

HOW MUCH TIME DOES A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER DEVOTE TO YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE OR TWITTER ACCOUNT?

I have seen all manner of articles saying you can do social media in 10 minutes a day. Baloney!  Yeah, sure, you can post a quick “Come see us for lunch today” or “The lunch special of the day is” pretty much in 10 minutes, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.  To properly use Facebook, it will take the small business owner at least 60 minutes per day.

Why? Because if you want to find videos, links, photos (not of your business), news, and community events it will take time to wade through a lot of reading and watching to find just the right possible posting.   You also want to confirm from a couple of sources the community event info. I’ve seen too many errors where one source says one thing and the other source contradicts it.  For video links, I watch probably 10 Youtubes to find the right one.  Some videos are too long, bad visuals or sound, too much blah blah before getting to the meat of it, or some just won’t work.

If you make videos, it takes time to script it, light it, and shoot it, edit it, plus the upload time to Youtube.  And that’s just for a 2minute video (don’t make them longer than that, people don’t have the patience unless it is an educational video). That takes over an hour right there.  Reading and researching daily headlines and news from a multitude — and I mean Multitude — of sources also takes time, approximately 30 mins. per day.  You also want to keep your website or blog up-to-date so you can link back to them (more time involved!)

OK, so you’ve now taken the time, 30mins to 60 minutes a day, to post on Facebook (we’ll get to Twitter in a moment).  What about being Social on social media?  You can’t just Post and Ditch, meaning put out an update and run.  What about interacting with your fans? Thanking them for their comment or like or their own posting on your page? Yes, leave the Wall open so your fans can comment or ask questions! Don’t be anti-social with no Wall posting allowed. You will have to keep track of these fan postings and comments and respond! Don’t leave your fans hanging there, ignored.  You can setup alerts to know when someone posts or comments on your page. This also takes your time.

Then you have posts or comments you will make on other FB business pages that your page (or you personally) have liked.  Posting as your page on other business pages gets your business known so it’s important to visit other pages and leave comments or likes. Just don’t spam anyone!

Now, Twitter.  Twitter is a different ballgame than Facebook. Whereas FB posts sit awhile, an hour or so, Twitter is a very fast stream and needs more input (Tweets) to keep it alive.  So take all the above info about researching, reading, linking, and video-ing and apply that 5 times over for Twitter. For example, if you post once daily to FB, you need 5 tweets daily for Twitter, again, at different times to reach various audiences.  Now that adds another 60 minutes a day to your social media time.

Throw in Twitter search to find new people to follow, respond to new followers, respond to @replies and DMs (direct messages), RT others’ tweets, ask questions of followers, and weed out the deadwood — Whew! You’re looking at another 30minutes. Time flies quickly and adds up.

Oh, how about the time it takes to stay on top of Facebook and Twitter changes?  Or learning new tools for social media?  Many changes are unannounced so you just have to figure it out. Things you thought would be there, aren’t. Glitches in FB and TW come up all the time. Ever encounter Fail Whale?  Add in another hour a month just to stay on top of platform changes.
TOTAL TIME PER DAY TO DO SOCIAL MEDIA YOURSELF:  FB:  90 minutes  + TW: 180 minutes = 4.5 hours daily. @ $20/hr (assuming you make at least that) = $90.00 per day x 22 days/mo = $1980. = $23,760. yearly.

Can you really afford to do this yourself?  Your time is better spent doing what you do best, your business, and delegate your social media to an expert.