How much time should you spend your social media / inbound marketing effort?
From traditional to digital, managing the various marketing and social media channels can quickly become overwhelming for small businesses and take away valuable time from important day to day activities. According to Constant Contact, most of small business owners spend over 20 hours a week promoting their businesses with half of this time used on the web, email and various social media channels.
About 82% of business owners market their companies over various platforms that include: website, email, and social media. When asked if the time spent was worth the level of effort, most of them agreed that it either created new customers (57%), increased the company web traffic (54%), and increased revenues (40%).
How much time do you need to spend per day on your inbound marketing efforts? The collegial answer is at least 2 hours per day. Half of this time should be focused on listening and the second half should be split equally between communicating/interacting and creating.
Listening: Find out what the world has to say about you or/and your industry, reviewing social media sites, relevant blogs and news media outlets
Communicating: Respond to your followers using various channels (social media, email, website, blog).
Creating: Writing new blog content, creating video, posting photos…remember search engines are striving for new content
You will still need to allocate a little bit more time to measure the result of the social media effort… ROI.
However there are still some small business owners that do not see benefits in spending time marketing themselves via social media and other social channels. Some of their obstacle are: they think that their knowledge in this field is too limited, that they don’t have the time, they are not sure if their customers are on social media, or they don’t know how the measure their social media campaign success.
If you have a doubt or are not sure how the digital media can help your business, we are here to help. iMarket4U can manage your social media efforts from creation to implementation, so you can focus on your core business while getting brand recognition and increase success.