How Much Time Should You Spend on Social Media Marketing

How Much Time Should You Spend on Social Media Marketing

A concern I hear a lot from advisors is that they don’t have time to be active on social, and I totally get that.

But the reality is social media is a marketing strategy. And according to a study posted on the Kitce’s website, the typical advisor is spending approximately 14% to 20% of their time on marketing.

So, say you work 40 to 45 hours a week, maybe 8 to 10 hours of those should be on marketing. But from what I understand, the typical advisor is also shooting for a 10% to 20% increase in revenue each year.

Compare that to an article by Tony Vidler, where he notes the top producers who shoot for a much higher growth rate each year are spending exponentially more time on their marketing efforts (up to 70%!).

Wherever you fall, I’d be willing to bet the more growth you hope to see year over year, the more time you need to be devoting to networking and marketing and building stronger client relationships.

How Much Time I’d Recommend When Starting Out

So how much of those weekly marketing hours would I recommend you spend on social?

If you’re just starting out on the social side of things, I’d probably spend 30 minutes to an hour a day, four days a week.

I’d recommend you spend a third of that time growing your network – getting more people to follow you, and since getting eyes on your content is how you’re going to build relationships, some ideas for growing your network include:

• On Twitter:
  • Follow people you’d love to have as clients.
  • Respond or retweet or like their tweets if it makes sense to do that (not in a stalker-ish way 😉 ), but a percentage of people you follow or engage with will follow you you back.
• On LinkedIn:
  • Identify your ideal client and…
    • First, click on their profile,
    • Second, send a request to connect.
    • And third, write a personal note with that request. (LinkedIn gives you an option of including a note when you send the connection request via their profile page (on desktop – not mobile), even if you’re not a LinkedIn Premium member.
    • So if you send connection requests to just five new members, each time you’re on LinkedIn, you’ll start to grow your network.
    • If they accept the invite, be sure to send them back a simple thank you, but don’t try to sell them anything. Don’t try to get an appointment or ask them for favors when they still don’t even know you. (They’ve already just done you a favor by accepting your request.) If anything, send them a couple of articles they might find interesting – just pure value.

Now the other two-thirds of your time should be spent on posting to Twitter and LinkedIn. Those are the two platforms I recommend. You might have others you prefer, but that’s where I’d start when you’re just starting out.

I’d post four times a week and that’s it. You don’t have to go post crazy. You’re just trying to build an online presence that helps people get to know you, get to like you, and get to trust you.

If you want to see a sample calendar of what I would post online, head to the free Resource Library, where you’ll find a sample calendar for the month of July with the posting frequency we just discussed, and samples of what you might post.

So, don’t over complicate it.  Post four times a week and spend a little bit of time growing your network.

Listen to the Podcast episode of this topic here.
Or watch the video on YouTube here (coming soon).