I recently sat in on a webcast that gave time estimates for marketing professionals. Their estimation was that each social media account (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) should require approximately eight hours/week. Therefore if you have four accounts your time dedicated to social media would be 32 hours/week. Ideally this would eat up the majority of time leaving eight hours to do all other marketing and administrative tasks.
While I agree that you can spend this amount of time on social media sites, does it accurately reflect how much time should be devoted to it? This model dictates that you should hire a full time resource to manage your social media. For small companies where your marketing department is one person, this is not feasible unless your marketing strategy relies entirely on Web 2.0 sites. For the rest of us, myself included, there are still traditional marketing media projects like collateral, web site administration, direct marketing, case studies, tradeshows, demos, etc.
The second challenge facing social media in marketing is measurement. How do we accurately measure the ROI for 32 hours/week? I can measure inbound traffic to my site and ideally customers should click thru to the page where they request more information and begin the sales cycle.
I spend approximately 10 hours/week devoted to social media sites for my company. However we are not blogging frequently, resulting in less of time demand. At the same time we’ve launched a new company and have created social media accounts. Should my time requirement now boost to 20 hours/week?
How much time do you spend on your corporate social media sites managing the accounts?
