At the Yoho Home Improvement Economic Summit last week, I was asked an interesting question by a home improvement dealer: “When should I hire a full time person to handle my social media?”
A year ago, no one would have even thought of “social media” as a job type. But we’ve come a long way since then.
So what is “social media”? I borrowed this definition from Joseph Thornley : “Social media are online communications in which individuals shift fluidly and flexibly between the role of audience and author. To do this, they use social software that enables anyone without knowledge of coding, to post, comment on, share or mash up content and to form communities around shared interests.”
However you define it, social media is all the rage right now in online marketing circles. That’s because the Internet users marketers are targeting spend more and more time engaged in it.
Back to the original question: When should he hire a full time social media expert? I answered that “full time” is way too big a commitment for home improvement companies. And that an investment in search engine marketing will produce a much better return than investments in social media. But that’s dodging the original question.
But how long should his home improvement company spend on social media each day? I would cap social media time to one hour a day. That’s it, no more, stop it right there. That is, for now—until the online world changes again.
Why only an hour?
Some social media are no longer worth the time that they were even a year ago. Example? MySpace. Once the darling of teenagers and college students whining about their latest trip to the mall, MySpace is on the express train to irrelevance—particularly for home improvement companies.
The MySpace audience always skewed extremely young to begin with, and that meant the Web site attracted too few homeowners to make it a worthwhile marketing medium. Add to that MySpace’s noisy, spastic page design incorporating music and videos everywhere. That leaves MySpace as a poor focus for a home improvement marketer.
On the other hand, Twitter is fast becoming a force of influence on the Web. BUT, with a 140-character limit on each post, how much can an online marketer really accomplish on Twitter???
To give you an idea of how long that is, I couldn’t post my last two sentences on Twitter, because they total 154 characters.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to tweet and acquire a following and audience. But Twitter has yet to prove that it can drive enough home improvement leads to justify your precious time.
I also maintain a Facebook account, a Flickr account, a Digg account and a StumbleUpon account. But I need those not to generate sales leads, but as a tool to help me with the search engine optimization work I do.
And despite the fact that I live and breathe this stuff…I still spend just an hour per day on social media. I have a business to run, just like you do. And it’s easy to get lost on all of hot social media Web sites that are new, funky and getting lots of buzz.
But they won’t generate a lot of sales leads for you. Yet.
So I cap my social media to an hour a day. And for now, I think that you should too.
Homeowner Connections Through Performance Online Advertising
