How to Manage Time Spent on Social Media Websites

By Romany Thresher

When I was speaking at the Global Entrepreneurs event in Johannesburg for Women in Finance, someone in the audience asked this question: «How on earth do you find the time to do all these things?»

Firstly, you need to establish how much time you are going to spend managing your social media activities. Once you have determined this, you can decide how and who is going to be managing your social media activities. I recommended a minimum of 2 hours a day.

Chris Brogan recently posted an interesting blog “How much time should I spend on Social Media.” In his blog, Chris also recommends a minimum 2 hours a day and shows us how to best use this time by breaking it down in sections, starting off with listening to conversations.

Basing this on a 5 day work week, this amounts to 40 hours a month or one week in a month which is a lot of time to be spending on managing your social media activities. If you are a business owner or a consultant, this may seem way too much time to be spending on social media and in our already busy lives it just adds more pressure, because we know it is a necessity, but you are like people already juggling all your responsibilities.

The good news is that there are other solutions, and you don’t need to be doing it all yourself. In fact it is not necessarily a good thing to be doing it all yourself because, as Richard White would recommend, you should be focusing your time on face to face networking and fee income producing tasks.

My recommendation is that you allocate a set amount of hours for yourself because your audience needs to know that you are in fact participating and engaging with them on a personal level. Then you either use a staff member to manage most of your social media activities, or outsource your social media activities to a virtual assistant, who specialises in social media, to manage it for you.

The benefit of outsourcing or using an existing staff member:

• You free up some valuable time
• Adds another perspective and personality to your business which adds to your brand
• A trained person in this area would do it far quicker than you would
• Two minds are better than one, more ideas for content
• Increases revenue

Many business owners think that by managing everything themselves they are saving on staff costs and therefore reducing their overheads but in actual fact you are losing way more, but this is for another blog… Don’t be afraid to use a member of your team, you will be surprised at just how beneficial this is to you and your business. Corporate companies are using existing staff members to manage their social media activities. One business who did this extremely well is Zappos.

References:

Chris Brogan

Zappos

Romany Thresher
Direct Assist Online

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Romany_Thresher

http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Manage-Time-Spent-on-Social-Media-Websites&id=3348024

More From oaktree

• 5 Tips On How To Make Social Media Work For You
• Why Your Business Needs To Be Using Social Media
• How To Use Social Media Marketing To Build Your Legal Business

oaktree Recommends

• A Neat Technique For Not Getting Trapped In The Google Sandbox  (BlogGuru)
• Search Engines – Traffic – On Page SEO and Off Page SEO  (BlogGuru)

Ask oaktree To Recommend Your Posts