Too much social media can be an issue on your overall mental health, but it can also have negative ramifications for your business or organization. In this post we talked briefly about the ramifications of spending too much time on your business/organization’s social media.
What are We Doing?
A good question to stop and ask yourself is what is being done with your social media. It typically takes 5 to 10 minutes a day for a business/organization to effectively post on their profile and address any questions or comments that have come in. What tends to happen though is an internal social media manager spends several hours on social media. What is typically happened is that they think they are “following up” but have been sucked into the social media feeds. Social media platforms are built specifically to keep you on the platform for as long as possible, turning into a major time suck. We recommend business owners get detailed rundowns on what has been accomplished in each amount of time spent on social media.
How Are We Doing?
This is plays off the “what are we doing” question and tries to quantify and rate the work being conducted. Significant amount of work can be completed but what is the result? This is an important concept to establish early on with any marketing strategy.
Let’s consider your time to be a monetary budget. For the sake of this example, let’s set an hourly rate of $300 an hour for you and your business’s time spent. Let’s also suppose that you have a marketing manager who works 40 hours a week. You have this marketing manager focused on a variety of things for your business (website, blog post, social media, email marketing, and other outreach methods). If they spent three hours a day for an entire month on social media, the hourly cost at $300 an hour would be $19,800. For that kind of investment, you should see significant follower gains and sales.
How Does Social Media Compare to Your Other Efforts?
We hear constantly from people how blogging and working on their website’s content just doesn’t work. The question we ask is how much time is spent on social media and how much time has been spent on their website’s content. Often, the time spent on social media far outweighs other efforts. Just building a new website that’s built with the innovative web standards can increase leads and sales significantly. We see phenomenal results with businesses that put effort into SEO, and the number of hours invested has a much better “bang for your buck” compared to social media efforts.
Closely Monitor Your Time
It’s important to closely monitor how much time you are spending. Using a time tracking tool like Toggl helps you see where you and your team’s time is going and how to re-prioritize your time. It’s important to accurately quantify your social media efforts, which we provided a series of tips a few months back in a blog post. Who knows? You may be spending the right amount of time, but just are unaware that your efforts are leading to sales.
