Making Efficient Use of Your Social Media Campaign - A Debut Into Social Media Marketing

With over a billion friends on Facebook, millions of followers on Twitter and Google Plus, not every business is joining in the social media revolution. Some businesses had a slow entry into the World Wide Web almost a couple of decades ago, and now some are missing the opportunity to expand their geographic and demographic markets by not taking a plunge into social media. Taking the time to develop a strategy for how you want to use it and making it useful for your business is key. Finding where your competitors, clients and potential clients are is a start to see where your presence needs to be. It is not too late to enter into the social media world and not have to take too much of your time. Here are some helpful hints of where to find a place for your business and make it work for you.

LinkedIn - Seen as more of a professional site, LinkedIn is a first step in creating a social media presence. All that needs to be done is have a well written summary of your company's profile, listing your products services, years in business and a link to your company's website. Your customers and friends will "follow" your company if there are any updates. Creating your company LinkedIn page should take under 30 minutes with confirmation emails, and maintaining it on a monthly basis would take under an hour. Twitter - Using 140 characters to make a few updates a day will create a different kind of social media presence. Much like a mini-press release of announcements, Twitter is the chic way of finding out trends, creating a backlink to your website and offers a new way of seeing what the competition is doing. You can commit up to 30 minutes a day total time in the research for articles to tweet, retweet and linking any information you want to advertise. Avid tweeters can send up to 50 tweets a day, but beginners can commit to 3 or 4 tweets a day, tweeting at different times of the day. Facebook - With over a billion users, Facebook is one of the most accessible of all. Creating a page is easy, and gives users the opportunity to create Facebook ads to reach many users based on Facebook's own data. It is still a way to get a name known to a new market, and offers a way to feed both Twitter and Facebook updates simultaneously. Setting up, creating a Facebook page profile, and finding the right cover and profile pictures would be simple to upload and can take under 30 minutes. The hard part would be investing the time to finding "likes" among your customers. Create a plan of putting the Facebook logo on your printed media as well as your website and it it will help create a following of "likes." Google+- This is Google's way to have circle of friends, offer status updates and share documents. One advantage of having Google+ is that your company will be listed in Google searches. The amount of time to use Google+ depending on how much time you want to create the uploads, the status feeds and the sharing of documents. It would take minutes to set up a Google+ account with a gmail address and fill out the information questionnaire. Generating your list of circles could take some time to build, and could be up to 1 to 2 hours to begin the process if you have a large list of customers. Maintaining Google+ could take as much time as Facebook or Twitter would on a weekly basis Pinterest - This is the fastest growing of the social media sites. It offers a way to organize information visually of your products and services in a different format. Creating an account and setting up boards would take under 30 minutes to do. Maintaining pinnings of your company's interests, uploading pins and creating the videos or infographs that you want to use would take some time. For basic upkeep, it would be 2 hours a month.

For the basic set-ups of these services, it could take a couple of hours, but maintaining these accounts would be key. You can anticipate 3 to 6 hours a week added to your time if you want to self-manage your efforts in your social media presence. You can always delegate tasks of creating videos, infographs or articles to someone on your staff, who is savvy with internet marketing or to a social media virtual assistant to keep maintenance of your accounts.

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