Hi all, we at SixVine Media are expanding our business into social media management and to that end have hired a copy writer who will manage our clients profiles.  We are a web design and video production studio in Phoenix and didn’t start out with that in our business model.  It’s our client’s fault!  They have joined the choir and saying that using social media is too much of a time sink and they don’t see the ROI.  How do you feel about the time you spend on social media?  Is it worth it?

Social media becomes a time sink when businesses go into it without a definite plan. You can’t engage in social media just to engage and be up on the latest technological advent. Businesses need to realize that social media is give and take. They can’t just use it for advertisement. They need to also use it to help potential customers solve problems and to get a better gauge on what trends are going on in their respective industry.

Social media can certainly be a time sink if you don’t have a plan going into it. There are lot of moving parts if you want to implement a successful program. Some of things you’ll want to think about are policy/guidelines, scalability, what are you going to measure and how is it going to be aligned with your business goals, who is going to create the content/what type of content are you going to create, what technology do you need to create efficiency, planned testing, who is going to manage and moderate the community, how is social media going to interact with your other marketing initiatives, plus a whole lot of other things! So it makes sense to plan, so you aren’t wasting your time throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping something will stick.

As everyone else stated, like any type of marketing have a plan & goals. How does social media fit into your overall marketing plan? What do you expect from it? Do you have the resources to do it well? If not, don’t do it. Quality is better than quantity. 

What social media, if any, does your target market use? How? How often? What’s important to them? What kind of information are you sharing? How are you developing relationships.