The truth is being involved in social media takes time, some­thing that most peo­ple don’t have a lot of. In the past few weeks I have heard from sev­eral cus­tomers, friends and even my den­tal hygien­ist that they just don’t have time for social net­work­ing. So how can reg­u­lar folk get involved with social media? How much time does it really take and how can you fit get­ting involved with social media into your day-to-day routine?

1–5 Hours per Week — Per­sonal Participant

A per­sonal par­tic­i­pant prefers to post less often. Per­sonal par­tic­i­pants can set up MySpace or Face­book pages and groups, run a Twit­ter feed, com­ment on blogs, and/or upload images to a site like flickr. He/She finds that the most time-consuming aspect of post­ing to sites like Face­book or Twit­ter is both the broad­cast­ing aspect (decid­ing what to post) as well as keep­ing up with build­ing lists of friends and followers.

5–10 Hours per Week — Social Participant

A social con­tent par­tic­i­pant can start a blog or a pod­cast. Both activ­i­ties require slightly more advanced tech­ni­cal skills and a larger time com­mit­ment. Blog­gers should aim for a min­i­mum of at least one post per week, but two or three would be bet­ter. This type of blog­ger is also usu­ally con­tribut­ing to a com­pany or com­mu­nity web­site and focuses on dri­ving traf­fic to their websites.

10–20 Hours per Week — Global Participant

The global par­tic­i­pant is much more involved with social media. The global participant’s focus is more nar­rowly aimed towards his/her busi­ness or niche. He or she is involved in com­mu­nity web­sites; they work with dis­cus­sion boards and projects that involve other social media sites. Basi­cally this cat­e­gory involves get­ting involved in larger scale activ­i­ties and once launched and run­ning, they take on a life of their own. This type of blogger/social net­work­ing wiz­ard is most likely work­ing with a web­site design firm spe­cial­iz­ing in search engine opti­miza­tion and web­site traf­fic ana­lyt­ics to improve their search engine rank­ings and ulti­mately gen­er­ate qual­i­fied busi­ness leads.

If you fit into any of these roles and need help get­ting started, stream­lin­ing all of your social media post­ings or more advanced help with increas­ing your search engines rank­ings and web­site traf­fic analy­sis, con­tact VTech Direct a local Cincin­nati, OH web­site design firm.

Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Website Design