How to Know If You Are Spending Too Much Time on Facebook
The torrent of users’ statistics for Facebook has shown us recently that we have become addicted to social networking. Recent academic studies of Facebook users have indicated that it may be more addictive than smoking and drinking1and 26% of people surveyed said that they felt ill at ease if they didn’t log on to the site regularly2. Users are spending an average of 75 minutes on the site and log in an average of 6.1 times per day2.
To many marketers this captive audience of nearly 900 million people must look like a gold mine for promoting their products, and as many as 59% are spending six hours or more every week on the social media sites3. On the other hand, it is easy to waste a lot of time chatting and looking at other people’s pages and it is often difficult to determine what sort of ROI you are getting from the time that you spend on social media sites. To determine whether you are spending too much time on Facebook, you have to ask a few basics questions about what your social media efforts are doing for your business.
What are your goals for social media?
A lot of businesses may have started their Facebook brand page because they wanted to be in on the latest internet fad in marketing, or because it is free and gives you access to a huge potential market. Unless there are clear goals to using social media then it is most likely not delivering much of a result for the time that you are investing. Setting clear goals will make it easier to define exactly what you will do when you log on to your social media pages and so you will use the time that you spend there more effectively.
How are you spending your time on social media sites?
Social media is better suited to raising brand awareness and engaging your customers than it is to directly driving sales. This means that the focus of your activities on social media needs to have a first click rather than a last click mentality, and if you are spending your effort on a hard sell campaign then you are barking up the wrong tree. Engaging customers on social media sites is also vital to success, but if you are spending hours every week looking through people’s photos and commenting on their quirky links, then your focus isn’t in the right place.
How much traffic is social media generating for your website?
Statistics have shown that the main goals of social media marketing for most businesses are increased exposure of their brands, while 69%3 of marketers pointed to traffic to their website as a major objective of their social media marketing efforts. Check the statistics on your website and see how many visitors are coming from social sites. The more time that you spend on Facebook or Twitter, the more traffic there should be originating from them, and if it isn’t then you have probably not been using your time on them as effectively as you should have been.
Social media can be one of the most dynamic marketing tools for any business, but it can also be a major waste of time if you don’t have a structured approach to using it. Having a plan for social media marketing and sticking to a schedule for using it are the best ways to maximize the benefits while minimizing the time that you expend on the sites. InfintechDesigns.com can help you to develop a social media marketing strategy that will make the time that you spend on Facebook really work for you.
References:
1.http://www.bgr.com/2012/02/06/facebook-and-twitter-are-more-addictive-than-cigarettes-or-alcohol-study-finds/
2.http://www.bloggersblog.com/blog/40220121
3. 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, Michael A Stelzner, Social Media Examiner
