Social Media Marketing: Are You Wasting Your Time?

If you own your own business then you're always thinking of ways to gain new clients or customers and how to spread the word. One of the best ways is via Social Media Marketing (SMM). You can get your business in front of those people you most want to target and converse with them in ways no other medium can.

But, it's also one of the biggest wastes of your valuable time. Due to its' natural tendency to make you play the game and chase the numbers SMM can distract you from what's important.

Technology provides us with more opportunity, more opportunity to waste time.

"Oh I got 100 maybe 1,000 or more visitors to my site yesterday from Digg, what a triumph, wait til I tell my colleagues."

Whoopie do well done you! All that time sending shouts really paid off. All those messages on other social sites got so much attention for your site.

Are you chasing Diggs or votes on sites that only serve to test your bandwidth limit on your hosting package. At the same time are you on Facebook, Linked In, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Furl, Twitter, Sphinn or forums trying to spread the word?

Do you find yourself still on these social sites maybe 2 hours beyond the time you originally allocated to the task?

It's all too easy to get sucked into marketing your business using social media but don't forget that all the time you're being social, the clock is ticking.

Don't get me wrong, the whole idea of SMM is to be social and to give to receive and all those votes you're giving other people might prove valuable. But I know myself that if you're spending large amounts of time socialising, then the real work isn't getting done.

You spend so much time trying to attract attention this way that you miss the real point. The real point of SMM is to converse with those you are trying to target. Those that will return again and again or will actually take things one step further and contact you for work.

If you find yourself caught up in the social whirl then stop and think:

What am I doing today that will earn me money.

SMM is important for any company but needs to be channeled in the right direction and mustn't get in the way of paying work.

In my follow up post, Optimize Your Social Media Marketing, I'll point out what social sites are out there whilst choosing the best ones for your niche and then prioritising your marketing to maximise the ROI of your time.