Is Social Media a Waste of Time?
If we do the math we can assume that it takes about 7 minutes to create, post and upload on social
media. Now, if you post say 3 days a week that would average to 156 posts a year, which means
you’ve spent a total 18.2 hours on social media a year.
The question is, is all of your time spent posting on social media fully supporting
your revenue in services, or are you just not reaching to your customers in the
most effective way? Basically, are you wasting your time.
In today’s mainstream platforms of social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, the majority of
users use these platforms as a way to communicate with friends and post status updates, unless if
you’re a business. It is extremely crucial to let your followers know about important updates and to
be able to fully reach them. This can be an issue because in the Facebook algorithm only 10% of
your followers see your posts. That’s about one thousand followers, and only one hundred of them
seeing your new special service discount.
So what can we do about it?
- Focus On Your Target
Ideally you would use your social media to promote new services, give updates, and to stay
connected with your customers. So it is important that would construct your platform towards your
target audience, and make it appealing and comfortable for them to navigate. Consider what social
media platforms your target audience most likely would be on, such as Instagram or Facebook. For
example, Facebook is the largest social network on the web with over 2 billion active users, which is
a great place to connect and start a business on, regardless what type of business you are.
However, Instagram is a visual social media platform with over 700 million active users that post
about food, travel, art, and fashion, so if your business is more oriented in a creative atmosphere
you would use Instagram since it’s much more condensed in the type of users and interest. Your
presence on social media is important because it makes effective impressions on viewers, and will
help drive their interest in your company. - Quality vs. Quantity
Now that you’ve thought what and where your target audience is, let’s think about how we could stay
engaged between the user and the viewer. Posting quality content that is related to your company is
crucial and it is also important to keep active as well. So it’s good to balance out the quality of your
posts and how often you update. It’d seem that posting the most quality content would be preferable,
but it’s not the best idea because you’d want to use social media effectively instead of investing all of
your time into it. Also on the other hand, posting constantly with low quality posts can cause you to
lose followers and interest because it can leave the impression to the viewer that you aren’t
thoughtful in the content you provide. Some good examples to use are videos, because they can
provide the most content and information, and can be made effortlessly. It engages viewers and
motivates them to find out more about your business. - Timing is Everything
We’ve established that presence is everything and that you should balance out quality and quantity
when posting. So let’s look at the ways to manage your platform and how to schedule posts.
Hootsuite.com is a great site to manage and schedule social media, and it’s free (with some optional
membership subscriptions). For up to 30 days at a time, you can schedule posts by date and time,
as well as upload photos and text, and upload at multiple social media platforms at a time. Thinking
about when to publish posts is also something to consider, so you can make sure that the most of
your viewers see your post. According to SproutSocial.com the most social engagement on
Facebook are during the hours of 8 am to 3 pm, and with Instagram its 10 am to 5 pm. You can also
post at times where other people would be off of work, such as before hours or after hours.