I am still on a kick about what it really costs to work on your social media marketing. We are assuming right here that you are going to do all the work on your social media yourself rather than have someone in your office or having an external marketing firm do this for you.
We have determined that writing your blog yourself, if you are worth $30 an hour, is going to cost you $720 a month with a time cost of around 24 hours.
Now lets look at the other main social media platforms. The platforms that are getting a lot of recognition these days are Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google +. I read that Facebook Fan Pages are soon going to get made-over to look like the personal Facebook Timeline, so bear in mind that you will have some extra work to do at first before you can settle down to business as usual.
I have a name for these platforms. I call them Time Vampires. Like spending all day reading email, these platforms can all suck you into working on them to the exclusion of all, and I mean all, else. So you have to have a plan. Since there are plenty of plans out there, I wont go into that.
Lets assume that you have a working social media budget allowing you to work on social media marketing for two hours a day and not a minute more. Your time is still worth $30 an hour (remember this is a hypothetical). Two hours a day means you spent $60 of your worth on social media in one day. There are 20 working days in a month, not counting the fact that most of us actually work on Saturdays. So you have just spent $1200 a month for a total of 40 hours of your time. Dont you love math?
Add this $1200 to the $720 a month doing your blog 3 times a week. You have now spent just shy of $2000 on social media of your time. Your actual time spent was 64 hours at approximately 12 hours a week.
How much is your time worth? Is it more than $30 an hour? How many hours per week are you working now? Are you ready to add at least 12 more hours a week to do social media marketing? And remember that these are all Time Vampires. You could get pulled in for a few extra hours a week and easily end up spending the equivalent of 2 days doing social media.
Here are your options as I see it: The first is that you do all this as well as your regular work. The second is that you turn it over to someone who already is doing a full workload. The third is to hire someone, probably part-time, to be your social media manager. Your fourth option is to hire an external firm like us at BroadVision Marketing to handle it for you. Your fifth option is to deep-six all social media or only do blogs or Facebook. I would suggest that unless you have more business than you can handle and you are sure it is never going to your competition, you might not want to choose the fifth option.
What would be the best fit for you?
Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing, helps business owners and business professionals put marketing strategies in place that consistently secure new clients. He can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.799.1238. You can Like him at www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing or connect with him on www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.
Related articles
- How To Create A Social Media Marketing Strategy That Actually Works (alltopstartups.com)
- Social Media: It's All in the Timing (findyourtippingpoint.com)
