Reading the title of this blog post, you might think I’m saying social media marketing is a waste of time. I’m not. So, you can calm down and put away your weapons. On the contrary, I believe social media marketing is something just about every company should be investing time into. We’ve entered an age where it’s become all about relationships. By spending time engaging and building relationships with your target audience, you can see a positive impact on your bottom line by earning consumer trust, building loyalty with existing customers, increasing awareness, and so on.

Unfortunately, social media marketing can also be a time-suck if not managed properly. It’s so easy for somebody to get sucked into Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, or some or channel, mindlessly surfing around for extended periods of time while doing no real work. Heck, the average person spends 7 hours a month on Facebook. We’ve become a culture of experts at killing time online.

The problem is that for marketers wasting time with your social media marketing equates to wasting money. Time is money. If you’re not spending your time on social media marketing efficiently, it quickly becomes a losing proposition. The more efficient you are with it, the higher the margin of returns.

Of course, this begs the question – How can you stop wasting time with social media marketing and start being more efficient?

• Set a schedule—You have to start treating social media marketing just like any other business activity. That means scheduling it into your day. One way to do this is by scheduling a few 10-15 minute blocks throughout each workday specifically for social media tasks, such as responding to comments, posting new content, monitoring brand mentions, etc. Set a timer and make sure you stick to it! This will help you stay focused.
• Make a to-do list—One of the reasons people end up wasting so much time with social media marketing is because they aren’t exactly sure what they need to be doing. So, they have no direction and get distracted. It’s important to have an overall social media marketing strategy with clearly defined goals, and to support that, you should have an outline of specific tasks you need to do in order to carry this out.
• Consider automating certain tasks—No, you can’t turn all of your social media marketing on autopilot, because it’s still about engaging your audience and having meaningful interactions with them. However, you can automate certain tasks to save you time. For example, you could schedule some of your Tweets in advance, so that you aren’t spending time every single day trying to come up with something new to say. As long as you’re still making the effort every day to be present, it’s okay for certain tasks to be scheduled or automated. It will save you time and help you be more efficient.

Take an honest look at your social media marketing efforts. Have you been wasting a lot of time? If so, it’s time to address the issue so you can get a better return on your marketing.