Is Facebook A Time Suck Or A Viable Marketing Strategy?
If you are a small business owner, your title could most likely also include IT department, marketer, blogger, web designer, financial officer, and HR. (And those don’t include other titles that you may hold such as husband, wife, father, mother, child…) With all those titles also come responsibilities and those responsibilities come with their own time requirements. As a small business owner, one of the hardest things to do can be deciding where your time is best spent.
We have been trying out a lot of different marketing strategies lately. Each one requires their own special amount of attention and time devoted to them. We started this blog, we are also social networking using LinkedIn and Facebook, commenting on other blogs, Social Bookmarking using StumbleUpon and Digg, as well as keeping up with all of our other marketing that we have been using previously. One of the things that we are forced to make decisions on now is which of these marketing strategies is worth our time and which of them are what I like to call a huge time suck.
A time suck is something that devours a lot of your time but that does not give you a lot in return.
In order to weed out the time sucks in my life, one of the questions I have found myself asking is:
Should I spend the next half hour loading applications to my Facebook or working on my next article or blog post?
If I load some of these applications, I could send people kittens, chocolate, lollipops, blow kisses, and send out rays of sunshine. Which is all very lovely, but at the same time I don’t know how that it is going to further my business.
What I like about Facebook is that I can connect with people all over the world….I can reach out and help other small businesses much like I can with this blog….I can join groups of other like minded people… I can say, hey this is what I do, what do you do and how can we work together to further both of our businesses? What I am having difficulty with is how much time it would take me to interact with everyone through these applications that so many people are using. And when I feel that I just don’t have the time to respond to everyone that sends me a teddy bear, I honestly feel a little guilty.
Now if that same person that sent me a spoonful of sunshine had sent me message that asked me for a tip, or gave me a tip, or asked me a question, or shared a useful website then that would be something. Then that would be a network of people working together to further everyone’s success. Then that would not be a time suck.
I am relatively new to Facebook and I know there are a lot of people that say it is a great way to market your business. I would like to see how many of our readers use Facebook and what your experience with it has been. So please chime in…
I wrote the above post over three weeks ago and it has since been stewing in my Drafts. Why didn’t I post it? First of all, I was wondering if I had been too quick to judge Facebook. To make sure I had given it the chance it deserved I was going to devote some time to it and see what came of it. Secondly, I wanted to make sure that I was not alienating the people that have been sending me tokens through the many applications available. After considering it further I don’t see this post doing that and I feel that the questions I raise here are valid… and it appears I am not the only one asking them. This post at Small Business Trends by Deborah Brown addresses the same time-suck issue.
In her post she states:
Shara Karasic reviews the steps of Creating a Facebook Fan Page for Your Business. Once your page is set up, Shara talks about the importance of providing value on your page to create a need in the fans to return, noting “Keep your fans happy by offering them useful and relevant info, a place where they can connect with other fans, applications they can use, and special updates just for them…
I would recommend this same advice for your website. So that then raises the question: would you be better off spending your time putting that effort into your website or your Facebook profile?
It still seems that it all comes down to that basic question: Where is your time best spent?
Reader Comments
Great blog Brandi and I use FaceBook and other social networking sites as a marketing tool myself and I would say that it’s effective marketing strategy when done correctly.
Find right groups, get connected with like minded people and simply network…
It’s not much different then local chamber of commerce.
I think the reason to extend a presence in Facebook is if you have customers or potential customers who are spending a lot of time there. Depending on your business, that may or may not make sense for you. It’s good to do everything you need to do to make your destination site useful and relevant, but consider that the web is getting more and more distributed and peole don’t necessarily visit destination sites.
Thanks to everyone who commented. I think the 2 most important statements were what Renato said about getting “connected with like minded people” and what Shara said about “if you have customers or potential customers who are spending a lot of time there.”
Figuring out which social networking sites are going to fit your business the best will be the key to your success in this area. I think too many businesses think they have to join every social network if they want to succeed. I think you need to find the RIGHT social network if you want to succeed. Focusing your time and energy into 1 social site that fits your goals will bring you much better results than spreading yourelf thin over a bunch of sites just so you can say you are using them.
Sure Facebook is a revolutionary way to connect with people. Within just a few months I connected will all of my old buddies from High School.
However I have noticed that once you sucked in and start messing around you can waste heaps of time.
I have a business page on facebook, but honestly have not found any business value from it.
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Tim is Co-Founder and CEO of About Brandi Cummings
Brandi is Co-Founder and CCO of Telecentrex, LLC and brings over 3 years of expertise related to article marketing and various content-related Internet marketing strategies.
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I myself don’t know a lot about facebook, (I think one of the reasons is I don’t have the time and always looked at that type of stuff as a time suck)…Hmmm, maybe I need to take another look at facebook myself. Great blog by the way.