Is Social Media a Time Suck?

I hear this complaint over and over and over again from small companies that don’t blog or have a social media presence. It never surprises me – I believed that for a long time, too. Probably for my first whole year of interacting with few results. It isn’t quick, it isn’t easy to learn, and businesses already have their interoffice ways of doing things that don’t include time to chit-chat about the riff-raf with strangers. There was a time not too long ago that communicating trivially with strangers on the job carried flirtatious implications with raised eyebrows from coworkers and nasty gossip. (It still might, definitely keep tabs on your office staffers! If you don’t know how, download my reference guide The Very Best Way to Use Twitter For Local Business.) These days talking to strangers the right way online can make you a superstar in your industry, niche, or location. Doing it right, however, isn’t done overnight. Don’t give up too quickly.

Tell me, what aspect of your marketing doesn’t go hand-in-hand with work? Everything requires work. There is no such thing as doing something that produces income that is not work. It’s not extremely hard work, but it’s hard work. The payoff  is way worth the effort, though, and actually much easier to achieve once the mindset of “social media time-suck” is replaced with, “Oh, this is elbow grease.”

Yeah, it’s going to take some effort to learn and to implement. But so does going to your networking meetings and continuing education classes. The big picture of your future in business includes connections in social media circles.

Never underestimate the power of learning a new strategy. You don’t get yesterday back, and while there are great things to learn from marketing past that are still very relevant and true today, if you don’t position yourself for the future it will pass you by. A blog takes time, targeted social media relationships take time to cultivate, and if you wait for next year you’ll be that much farther behind your competition and your goals.

Have you recently embraced online interactivity, either through blog posts or social media? Leave me your comments, my CommentLuv plugin will pull your blog post link for others to see and provides a back link to your site from mine. Tell me about your foray into social media, and don’t forget to connect with me on Twitter and Facebook.