Building up followers and fans and interacting with them takes up a lot of time. So how much time should you spend on it if you’re a SME owner doing all this yourself?

At a recent seminar on social media networking, it was suggested that people should spend an hour a day initially, broken down into chunks of about 20 minutes at least three times a day. In addition, if your business has an international market, it’s wise to try and Tweet at times of the day when the whole world is likely to be online, estimated to be from 7am to 9am and 7pm to 9pm.
Realistically, it’s unlikely that, as a busy SME owner, you have that much time to spare in one day. You could always get an employee to do it for you but you need to ensure that person can reliably project your business interests and integrity. You can of course outsource the social networking to an internet marketing company but, there again, you need to make sure that they understand your business vision and can project you and your business in an appropriate manner.

There are some useful time saving tools online that can help you with Twitter and Facebook posting. Social RSS is a Facebook application that allows you to add favourite RSS feeds to your business page. So you can add a feed from your website or blog so that when it updates, it automatically sends an update to the Facebook page. You can also add a Twitter application to the Facebook page so that any Facebook status updates automatically update your Twitter status too.

Other free Twitter tools include TweetDeck, which we described in an earlier blog post; Monitter, which tells you in real time when somebody is discussing a particular chosen topic; Twellow – a Twitter directory where you can find other Tweeple in your industry, location or with similar interests;and Hootsuite which is similar to TweetDeck but has additional groovy tools for scheduling Tweets, viewing other user info and viewing threaded conversations.

But all this effort could amount to a hill of beans if there’s no return on the investment your time. You need to be able to measure the effect that Twitter may have had on your website traffic, if that is your purpose in using it. Hootsuite has a tracking tool that will keep account of how many links were clicked on and where the users are from. But don’t forget Google Analytics which is a great way of finding out how many visitors to your site were referred there by Twitter.

So now you’re a Tweeting, Facebooking expert, we hope you have fun. Just don’t forget to Mention us in return to tell us how helpful we are! You can find us on Twitter and Facebook.

Well three hours of questions, answers and networking was certainly enough to wipe the smug, all knowing smile off my face. Why? Because it (a) reminded me that many people do not know the first thing about Twitter, Facebook and (b) made me realise that all this time I’d been doing it wrong. Not completely wrong maybe, but not totally right either. For the benefit of those novice Twits..er…Twitterers who are wondering where to start, let’s start at the beginning.

Firstly, why should you bother with followers, fans and Tweets anyway? Last year’s Understanding Micro Business Survey of 1800 businesses carried out by the Flying Solo group found that 85 per cent of respondents still say word of mouth is the best method of finding new customers. The growing BNI (Business Network International) movement in Australia bases its success on the importance of networking and the value of relationships. With Twitter and Facebook also based on the principle of networking and answering the question, “What are you doing today?” it stands to reason that this is potential gold dust for anyone looking to share news about products and services that they offer. But if that doesn’t persuade you, maybe the news that Dell Computers has managed to accumulate $3 million in sales from one of its Twitter accounts will get you thinking.

So what’s the right way of setting up a Twitter or Facebook page? Tune in for the next blog update that will show you how to set up Twitter.