Spending-an-hour-or-more

Time. It’s one of the most valuable commodities in a small business. Every single day has so many  details to attend to and decisions to make, how you choose to spend every hour and every minute is important.

Are small businesses using some of their precious time on social media? That’s one of the first questions we ask each year as part of our annual social media survey.

After a slight downturn in 2012, it seems the average amount of time spent on social media has increased slightly, but the vast majority of our respondents are still spending an hour or less every day.

This year we also looked at company size and target customer to see if either of these factors would  change the time spent.  The study clearly indicates they do.

Time-by-segment-and-size

 SIZE MATTERS

The larger a company is, the less time individual members of the organization spend on social media. This makes sense: the more people you have on your team, the easier it is to spread the responsibilities for status updates, blog posts and engagement .

From the comments section, there were a number of respondents who indicated they are working on broadening involvement through out their respective organizations.

What will you change this year?

  • Increasing involvement of the rest of my organization
  • Increase company participation. Analyze campaigns and strategies to find best practices for the company 

CUSTOMER TYPE

Companies which focus on both consumers and businesses seem to be spending more time on social media than companies which focus on one or the other. Why? As social media has matured, we have seen companies selecting a few platforms on which to focus their attention. That’s harder to do when you have two distinct audiences.

THE BOTTOM LINE

more-than-a-year-agao

While the increase is only slight, most of the participants feel like they are spending more time on social media. When asked about the time they spend, only 13% of our respondents believe they are investing less time then they did a year ago. With this feeling of investing more time, there seems to be more focus as they work to insure the time is well spent.

We are going to continue to collect data through out the first quarter, so if you haven’t taken the survey, now is a great time to add your voice.

TAKE THE SURVEY NOW