On Monday I wrote about the benefits of social media marketing as reported in a recent survey done by Michael A. Stelzner and sponsored by Social Media Examiner entitled 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report: How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow Their Businesses. One of my conclusions was that the benefits increase in relation to the amount of time devoted each week to social media marketing and these benefits build over time. Just how much time should you be devoting to your social media marketing? This will vary depending upon your job and the size of your business. Large companies may have a department devoted to social media while a self-employed business person has to balance social media activities with their other work. This survey does give us some valuable information about budgeting our social media marketing time.

Time Devoted Each Week

Over 58% of those surveyed report spending at least 6 hours or more a week devoted to social media marketing and 34% spend more than 11 hours a week. We saw in Monday’s blog that there is a direct benefit to spending more time devoted to social media marketing. 72% of all marketers who spend at least 11 hours or more a week on social media marketing have improved sales. That seems like a fairly significant incentive for devoting more time on Twitter and Facebook.

Experience

For me one of the more interesting results of this study was the amount of time experienced markers spend on social media marketing as opposed to those just getting started in the field. We would expect that those marketers with experience, knowledge and insight would spend their time on activities that get results. 59% of the beginning marketers spend only 1 to 5 hours a week on social media marketing and the bulk of this group spends less than 10 hours a week on this task. In contrast 47% of the veteran marketers devote at least 16 hours a week or more to social media activities.

Besides seeing more benefits as a result of dedicated time to social media there may be other factors at play. 86% of the marketers with more than three years’ experience utilize blogs and 75% use video as opposed to 53% and 36% respectively for beginning marketers. Blogging and video are significantly more time consuming than Facebook or Twitter.

Conclusion

We saw in my previous blog, Study Supports Benefits of Social Media Marketing, that the benefits directly correlate to the time spent on social media marketing. Why then do 39% of the marketers surveyed spend less than 5 hours a week on social media activities? In contrast a significant number of veteran marketers spend more than 11 hours a week on social media. So how much time should you spend? This study suggests that the more time spent on social media marketing the higher the benefits. It also shows that there are benefits with even a small time investment in social media marketing. So even if you don’t have 10 or 11 hours a week you will still realize a benefit with a small time investment. In the past when I made business plans and budgets we would often devote between 5% and 20% of our budget to marketing. Think of your time as part of your budget. If you spend 40 hours a week on your business spend at least 4 hours on social media. If you are more like most independent and small business people I know then 10% of your time devoted to your business development would be more like 6 or 7 hours. No matter how much time you have consistently devote that time each week and you will see greater social interaction, more traffic and maybe even more sales. So how much time do you devote to social media marketing each week?

Image Media Partners is a social media consulting company that helps businesses and organizations plan, manage and execute their social media marketing plans. Contact us if you would like to know how we can help with your social media strategy.

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