When social media is all too much

I’ve tried to look at the relevance of most types of social media here on this blog over the past few years, and I know that a few readers have done some impressive things on one platform or another. However, I suspect that many more have been trying several of them and have had minimal results.

The problem is almost certainly casting your net too widely. There’s a threshold below which your efforts will slump to almost zero response, and that’s probably an hour or two a week on any one social media platform. If you’ve spent barely an hour in the past month trying to run a company presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and goodness knows what else combined, I doubt that your website analytics will be troubled much by visitors from social media.

There is a tremendous opportunity presented by social media, seriously. But it’s driven by effort. If you’re not seeing any results, why not get stuck into just one platform and see what you can get from it? Better still, if you have the staff, allocate a platform to a specific individual and ask them to commit to, say, half an hour a day. I think I’d choose LinkedIn to begin with nowadays – get your company page looking good, join discussion groups, apply to contribute articles …none of it is that difficult, and there’s loads of help online.