I’ve just been working through a very interesting report by Michael A. Stelzner (sponsored by the social media success summit) called How Marketers are using social media to grow their businesses. The data I found the most interesting was around time commitment, which is broken down into two key charts. The first is a graph that represents the entire sample of people that were surveyed – and 64% of these people reported to use social media 5+ hours a week, and 39% 10+ hours.
But what’s really interesting is the second chart – which breaks it out by experience factor. A quick glance sends the main message – people that are just getting started skew heavily to the < 5 hours category. Those that have been doing it for a few months clearly stand out in the 5 – 10 hour a week range. Those that have been doing it for a few years stand out in the 10+ hours area. Simple lesson: experience on social media quickly teaches you that you need to put a lot of time into it (or alternatively, the more engaged you get, the more benefits you see, thus leading you to spend more time).
There are all kinds of other interesting charts in the report – I strongly recommend you give it a thorough read.
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interesting and I completely agree with it. Most people start with social networking and have trouble getting into the flow. They think it dumb or a waste of time. But as you make connections and grow it becomes addicting to see how many more people you can meet or leads you can get.