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The good, the bad, and the ugly: How social networking sites are affecting small businessMy name is Shannon Russo – and I’m a recovering social network-aholic… The Ugly Yes, I admit it. After losing my job and deciding to make a go of freelance writing from home, I realized – a couple of months later – that roughly 3 hours of my day went into my socializing: catching up on hundreds of status updates, private messages and group invitations; maintaining my farm, and my ocean, and my roller coaster park (all of which I am very passionate about – well, all except the farming, but I had so many neighbors!); and participation (not always involuntarily) in various virtual water gun fights, drinking wars, and superpower gifting. And although I didn’t actually need a Twelve Step Program to kick my problem, I did find it necessary to make a lot of tough changes to my online habits. The biggest and perhaps the most difficult necessity was to differentiate my “social” networking from my “professional” networking, then cut down my “social” time by 80%. 80%! Ugh… I hate doing math yet… I find seeing numbers laid out in front of me makes a time goal much easier to commit to. Just how much time did I waste on managing my virtual farm/mafia/sorority/etc. (oh, fine, I’ll go get my calculator)? At first, my socializing was eating up – at least – 21 hours of my work week and family time. So I needed to hack out 16.8 hours per week leaving only 4.2 hours a week. Per day, that’s just a little more than thirty minutes to catch up on the latest gossip… er, goings on. Or, perhaps more appealing to some, just a little over one hour every other day (4 days a week). This made me really think about what and who was really important, and helped ease the guilt of blatantly ignoring the 100 or so requests from friends and followers to join this, that, or the other thing. The Good Once I knew the difference between social networking and professional networking (plus my newfound 16.8 hours per week), I could decide on a schedule for targeting my audience and advertising my products and services. This meant setting a time limit on managing Twitter accounts (updates, re-tweeting, adding followers, following others, tracking analytics and FollowFridays, etc), promoting Facebook pages (sharing links to relevant pages, messaging fans with important announcements, monitoring and posting to Discussion Boards, etc), as well as maintaining profiles on any professional networking sites like LinkedIn. I use applications like Seesmic Desktop or Tweet3 to manage multiple networking platforms from one location, like my Twitter accounts (all4beachtravel, arrangeyourvaca, vacarentalsbg), as well as my Facebook account for promoting my Fans of New England Coastal Beach Examiner page. Setting up separate Twitter accounts for multiple vacation rental properties gets much easier with these multi-faceted tools, plus an owner can more easily track audience statistics per property/listing. See Mashable’s 25 Twitter Apps to Manage Multiple Accounts. The Bad With a large variety of entities available to follow and watch and join and friend, be sure to review information carefully. You want to be certain that what you’re sharing with your customers is engaging, valuable, unique to your brand and business model, and most importantly, accurately portrayed from a source you know and trust.
Posted by Shannon Russo
on Dec 7th, 2009 and filed under Advertising & Networking, Advice, Tools and Software.
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1 Response for “The good, the bad, and the ugly: How social networking sites are affecting small business”Leave a Reply |
Hola!
Great article and very usefull . We do spend many time working and building our networking but we must be carefull about the time that we spend just socializing.
Saludos!