Social Media – Deciding to Move Forward with a Strategy

You’ve just dipped your toe in the social media lake and you are worried that maybe you’ve made a mistake. Have you? Maybe I can help you answer that question with a few questions of my own.

Do you have anything interesting to share?

Do you have some interesting material to share? What about some of these:

Material you might normally put in a newsletter
Articles that members of your staff have written
Articles about your organization in other media
Announcements of new products or services
Job Postings
News of your profession or business

Do you have time?

Do you have time to do all this? Here are some possible time requirements for various social media activities:
- Blogging – you need to do it at least three times at week or people will not find your blog worth following. Not everyone agrees with me on this. You can blog as little as once a week but if so, you have to do it on a regular schedule so your readers know when to check the blog. Each post can take between 30 minutes and an hour. It depends on how much research you need to do to write the post and how proficient you are with the blogging software.
- Tweeting – This can expand from 15 minutes per day to hours per day. It depends on what you want to achieve. Be prepared to spend a lot of time tweeting, looking for followers and finding material to tweet in the early days of tweeting. Again, people won’t come to visit unless you’re putting up lots of new tweets. Of course, spam tweeting will result in people “unfollowing” you.
- Updating a Facebook Group – I personally don’t do this much so I can only estimate time. After the initial setup, I suspect updating will take about as much time as tweeting.
- One time activities such as setting up online profiles. I would suggest preparing a profile and then going to all the usual profile sites and setting up your profiles. At a minimum I would do a LinkedIn profile and of course a Twitter and Facebook profile. It’s wise to establish your right to your name on all the major profile sites to avoid name squatters. This could take several hours but can be divided up over a few days or weeks.
Do you have a free hand to post and Tweet?
Do you have to have everything you write approved? If so, you can probably double the time you will need. I suggest that you get permission to post without approval after a discussion of the company’s focus and guidelines. If not, you’ll not achieve the “social” part of social media. It will just become another form or press release.

It’s a big commitment in time and budget, both of which must be allocated before you begin. The budget is for setting up a blog, hosting the blog, getting strategic advice, SEO and getting training in how to do everything. When you’ve managed a social media campaign for a few months you’ll probably agree with me that finding the time is the more difficult.