How much time do you spend on Social Media Marketing?

Alright, it is time that I get back to blogging outside of work. Why, you ask? Well, a lot has been going on and I feel that can use these medium to express my thoughts and hopefully teach others about the world of Social Media Marketing and learn something as well. Plus, I have a lot of topics on mind. I was giving a Social Media presentation to our partners at work on Friday and I was asked the question, how much time should you spend on Social Media? That question was immediately followed up with; we want to get on Twitter but have been told that it will take a lot of time monitoring. We will get into why you have not been doing Social Media in a later post, so we will only be focusing on the question of how much time should be spent on Social Media.

At work, we are a small office where everyone wears multiple hats and we have a wide spread Social Media program that includes, blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Pinterest, Google + and Instagram. So for me at work, to run an effective Social Media campaign a minimum of 4 hours a day is needed. In my mind, that is on the low end. I know that each company and industry are different and that time will vary depending on what your Social Media Campaign includes. Some companies will even have a dedicated Social Media specialist doing this full time.

Now, back to question, that I was asked, how much time do you spend on Twitter? I believe that Twitter alone can be done in less time. There are programs that allow you to set-up keywords, and offer great analytics and they are Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Sprout Social and there are others. In full disclosure, I am a Hootsuite fan.

I answered the question, by saying that you can do Twitter in an hour to an hour an a half a day, but yes you have to monitor throughout the day. Hootsuite is a great program to let you do this and it allows you to link it to Twitter, Facebook, etc. I recommended doing some research before hand to see what your customers are talking about and what your competitors are doing. I would follow your competitors, set up your keywords to what others are talking about and join the conversation. People don’t just want to hear about you, they want specials / deals and want to feel like they are communicating with someone. Twitter is about sharing and listening to what others have to say. Brands should have a human voice behind it as well and not just advertising. Hootsuite is free and is a web based program. You can check-in to see what people are saying in the morning, schedule your tweets, reply to people and check your keyword columns. Then leave the program up on your desktop all day and check it every half hour or so. We can get into when to post and what times work best in another blog post, but after 5pm you still have to monitor it. Remember, just because the work day ends at 5, Social Media does not.

How much time do you spend on Social Media a day? If you were only doing Twitter and nothing else how much time would you spend on it?