Why is Social Media a Full Time Job?

While it’s heartening to see more and more companies and business houses realize the value of social media as an important marketing tool; the fact that they are still not ready to allot enough resources to harness its full potential. This reduces the whole thing to a joke. Most of the companies prefer to shovel the responsibility of handling social media on their existing marketing team in addition to their current responsibilities. Regular marketing guys are not only sorely inexperienced and inept at handling social media they probably don’t even have enough time.

Social media takes an awful amount of time and energy before any success can be achieved. And those who are not too well versed with it tend to underestimate it. Just running a blog takes about 5-7 hours a week and when you throw in twitter and facebook, the meter starts running at top speed. You can well imagine how many hours running promotions and integrated videos into your social media initiatives would demand.

Even if the responsibility of handling social media is given to a PR person good with communicating and writing, or to someone who understands the brand well, it’s the amount of time required to keep facebook and twitter updated that kills the cat. The job of a PR person includes maintaining community relations, event planning, employee relation, advertising, government relation and not to miss something known as media relation. With social media thrown into the cauldron as well, who has the time and energy to make it work?

So any company interested in exploiting social media to its maximum advantage has two options. It can either create a complete team or at least a new position exclusively for social media or hire a social media firm who has already proven its mettle in the field. They just need to remember that putting a few hours a week into social media and expecting success is recipe of disaster. Social media may be free but that does not make it any easier. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it, in terms of both time and effort. I am sorry to say but there simply aren’t any short cuts.

Consider for a moment what results do you expect from posting once a week on your facebook page and then taking another week to reply to comments and queries. How do you expect to cut mustard by posting occasionally to twitter or linking it with your facebook account? The bottom line is you need a new full time position if you expect social media to deliver serious results it is capable of delivering.

The coming few years will see companies hiring people who will be solely responsible for handling social media. But those who like to take the bull by its horns understand its importance today and pay someone to do social media for them.

When a person’s sole focus is on social media he can keep accounts updated sometime several times in a day. Queries, comments and complains are handled immediately and disposed off speedily. Not only does he have time and energy to come up with creative promotional ideas, other duties do not get neglected in the process. This person can put together a plan keeping in view the goals of the company and keep an eye on changing trends in social media to mould the campaigns accordingly.

The payback is certain!