Episode 89: How Much Time Should You Spend on Social Media

What was discussed?

Quote of the day: “You can’t expect to hit the jackpot if you don’t put a few nickles in the machine.” – Flip Wilson According to a recent study, 64% of marketers are on social media for 6 or more hours a day. Only 45% of marketers think that what they’re doing (at least on Facebook) is effective.

Set Some Goals

When you go into social media, you need to have goals in mind. Typical goals would be to earn new business, gain exposure, build relationships with other businesses or potential patients, generate leads, reduce your marketing expenses by ranking well in the search engines from those social profiles, increase traffic to your site or develop loyal fans!

Choose Your Platforms

After determining your goals, figure out your main platforms. Focus on a few platforms that you feel most comfortable with and know that your audience will be browsing.

Plan Your Posts

A study was put out (LINK) by Broadcast to World which talked about how often you should post on different social platforms that showed that Facebook posts should be around 5-10 posts a week (1 or 2 a day), LinkedIn is about 1 time per day, Twitter is 7-10 times per day, Google+ around 5-10 times a week, and Instagram 3-5 times per day.

Remember Your Customers

When you develop your social media plan, keep the customer service angle in mind. Failing to see complaints on social media can have serious consequences. You need to be sure that you’re addressing the issues and making the customer feel like their complaint was heard.

Distribute Your Time Equally

Make sure your time is well distributed and that you’re spending time on all of the platforms that you’re committed to. It’s unlikely that you’ll spend too much time on social media. As long as you’re working to expand your audience and engage with your current customers and fans, any time put towards that will help you reach your goals. How much time you’ll realistically be able to spend is a different animal.

Consider Getting Help

You’ll want to make sure that you’re checking in regularly on social media. If you’re doing it yourself, you’ll want to spend around 5-10 hours per week responding, interacting, engaging, creating posts, and scheduling posts. If that seems like way too much, consider hiring someone to manage your social media for you! If you feel like you can handle it alone, just make sure that you have your goals in mind and your plan and strategy set.

If you need help with Social Media, we’ve got a free download for you! It’ll help you develop a Social Media campaign from A-Z and lets you know exactly what you’ll need to do to run a successful campaign. If you fill out the form there, you’ll receive one of our most popular free reports that we have which will tell you what platforms to be on, how to get started, how to engage on Social Media, and how to use Social Media to generate new patients.

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