Ok people, let me make something very clear... Social Media Takes Time!
I'm not sure where the misconception began, but many people seem to think that with Social Media you can ramp up and 'get your message out there' a lot quicker than with traditional media. The truth is, it's completely the opposite.
Traditional media is about 'pushing' your message out, and getting it in front of as many people as possible, whether or not they want to hear about it. All that takes is some money, depending on the size audience you are attempting to reach.
Social media, or 'inbound' is based on not only permission based marketing, but also on relevance. If the 'audience' is not interested in your message, not only can they tune it out, they will not even look for it.
So how much time does it take?
A recent handy chart by Beth Kanter that could easily be updated every day. However, even based on these estimates you're looking at 15 hours per week! anybody home? The average work week is 40-45 hours per week, that adds up to 1/3rd of an already packed full-time job. Dare I say, a successful social media marketing plan requires full time effort?
The five major parts of a good social strategy include:
1. Listening - or 'no engagement' which means spending about 15 minutes visiting sites such as Google Alerts, best smm panel Social Mention and Radian 6 to hear what is being said about your brand.
2. Promote - or 'broadcast and share' which means spending about 20 minutes on Digg, Twitter, BizSugar, etc sending out links to your blogs and content.
3. Participate - this is a 'low engagement' activity spending about 30 minutes per day, using HootSuite to respond to messages on Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, YouTube, etc.
4. Publish or - content intensive activity which means creating new content on your blog, using WordPress, or creating new video content. This often is very labor intensive and takes about 3-5 hours per week.
5. Build Community - high engagement activity which requires about 5-10 hours per week, and is about asking questions, answering questions and participating in the interests of your fans and followers.
Don't let any 'marketer' or agency sell you the story that with social media your brand will be the talk of the town in a few days. But at the same time, ignore social media at your peril. Your audience continues to prefer to engage with your brand, rather than be bombarded by it, and you need to find that sweet spot in your marketing strategy.