Exactly how much social media is enough?

One question I’m often asked by clients is “How much social media is enough?”. In reality, there’s a fine little line between not using social media enough and missing great opportunities to connect, and overusing it by spamming your target audience. So where do you draw the line?

Creating an optimised social media strategy to ensure a more efficient work day while still engaging with your target audience can help you get the most out of your campaign and manage your time on the social web.

The best way to get started managing the time you are spending is by choosing set times during your work day to update, engage, and interact with your target audience. This could be one of the first things you do in the morning, during a tea break or at the end of the day.

Before you select a time that you will use for your social media efforts, research and consider your target audience’s social media behaviour time wise and then schedule your time around it.

Automate your blog posts

While the social web consists of real-time conversations, it’s okay if you automate some of the updates and posts that you do on a daily basis. There are many tools you can use to increase your productivity by scheduling your updates on your blog and by using tools like Hootsuite.

Most days I schedule my blog posts to publish new posts on a set time. I’m not justifying that automation is the way to go with your social media strategy and that you should replace real-time conversations, but scheduling some updates such as blog posts can help you save time during your day. If you automate everything it will cause a disconnection between yourself and your target audience. Social media is all about being social — so don’t automate everything!

There are many other tools available online that allow you to post updates to multiple social media channels, such as Seesmic Ping that lets you post to 30+ social media platforms at once. Once again, if you are using this, do it with caution because if you are going to post multiple updates to social media channels such as LinkedIn and Facebook, you don’t want to be labelled as a spammer.

Geographical location of your target audience

It is also very important to take note of the geographical location of your target audience and peak times. If most of your audience is spending their time on the social web in the morning, it’s going to be quite hard to reach them if you focus all of your social media updates in the afternoon.

If you don’t know which peak times your audience hangs out online, do some reach and start by posting various times during the week and monitor when your posts have the most impact.

Social media marketing is really time-consuming and can be draining if not done in conjunction with a consistent social media strategy to help you manage your time effectively.