Social media marketing strategies have expanded in the current corporate environment. Business owners are increasingly curious about how digital marketing contributes to an industry's and small businesses overall performance. One characteristic is firstly the amount of money successful businesses invest in social media marketing.
How much time should spend on social media? It’s a question that has to be answered, but first, let’s step back to discuss and explain the strategy. Reaching your objectives or goals depends more on understanding the digital marketing or social marketing platforms and types of content your target audience engages with than on how many hours you spend creating blogs or articles. The secret key to effective social media marketing is quality over quantity.
How to create a social media strategy
Using social media to market your business and organization starts with three basic things.
- Creating Social Media Objectives
- Your audience
- The resources you have to give to a program
There are many details within these buckets, but going through these 3 steps will help you determine how much time to spend on digital marketing and social media marketing.
Creating Social Media Objectives
Establishing specific outcomes you want to achieve if you use social media for your small business is important. For instance, most people browse the web to see what they can discover for new followers. But you will need to be more selective than that if you wish to make the most of your time.
Do you want to publish five monthly promos for your products or services? In the first 90 days, do you wish to receive 500 followers naturally? Is it your motive or intention to establish yourself as an expert and attract an audience to your website so they might do business with you?
Define your digital marketing or social media goals and explain how they advance your industry's performance. You might decrease time spent surfing social media and struggling to decide what to post by having a focused approach.
Your audience
You will know your audience’s social media platforms and what content to share if you take the time to write out your client personas. You can foreshow what content your audience will be interested in if you are aware or familiar with their problems. Creating your first buyer persona? Utilize the Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter information you already have to determine when your audience is highly active there (or also use tools like Follower wonk, Moz analytics’ Tweriod, or Sprout Social).
Suppose your target market or audience is a well-skilled professional between the ages of 35 and 45 who mostly uses Facebook and Twitter and needs to answer questions regarding a, b, and c (related to your business). In that case, it’s an example of fundamental buyer persona information applicable to social media.
Evaluate your resources
Calculate and figure out how many hours you have each week across your department (even if the department is just your 45 hours). Then take stock of how much time your entire team right now spends on social media. Track your time in a spreadsheet or with time-tracking software like Harvest or Toggl. Do this for two weeks to see how much time is being spent on social media. It would not be surprising to find that you spend about 25% of your time on social media marketing or digital marketing.
How Much Time Should We Spend on Social Media for Business
Apart from financial budgeting, business owners also need to know how much time they should invest in digital marketing or social media marketing.
As per the Vertical Response survey, 43 percent of small businesses and industries invest up to 6 hours weekly on social media marketing. This time budget costs about an hour and 12 minutes a day on a five-day workweek.
Your ideal social media presence also differs, depending on the platform. For instance, several professionals recommend spending more time on Twitter marketing than on Instagram. Still, this depends on what your business centers on and who your target visitors are.
Following the recommended amount of presence on one social media platform will not help you reach your clients if they are more active on another site.
Another time investment tip for small business owners would be to perfectly measure how to balance quality and quantity in your social media presence. This aspect of social media marketing traces back to how most websites keep faith both in how mostly you can post and how strong your engagement is from your followers.
For instance, most article or blog post websites count on how long visitors stay to read your article. At the same time, they also measure how often visitor return to determine if they should promote your content with other users on their website.
