The typical American consumer spends more than 20% of their online time on blogs or social networks and more than 30% of their online time on Facebook. Nielsen recently reported that the world spends more than 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites, which is 66% more time than people were spending on them last year, or about 6 hours per month. These figures, when added to the busy daily schedules many are incorporating these hours into, are staggering. With the growth in popularity of using mobile devices to explore the Internet and access social networks, constant connectivity means instant-to-instant interaction is available. The challenge is no longer how to find information or connect with people, but how to balance the influx of opportunities.
For marketers, the ability to multitask has become paramount in order to keep up with this rapid form of interaction. As social creatures and consumers, it is not surprising that we would be powerfully drawn to new and effective ways to engage with one another, what is amazing is the extensiveness of the network available and the lifestyle change it has elicited. The benefits of involvement are too great to extract yourself from these social networks, so, as is expected of this rapidly changing industry, solutions for management of time have emerged: social media scheduling programs.
I found two interesting topics I wanted to Tweet about yesterday, but find tweeting in batches to be less conversational, so I scheduled the second Tweet. As an avid supporter of the genuine dialogue, engagement and community facilitated by online social networks like Twitter, I immediately felt myself in a catch 22, debating between efficient time management and authentic interaction. My question: does scheduling a tweet or blog post make it inauthentic? I posed the same question to Erica Swallow of Mashable after reading her article about 11 free services for scheduling social media updates. We agreed that to stay efficient and keep up with the pace of social media interactions, a degree of scheduling is appropriate, and that if your company is authentic, no matter the vehicle for your posts, either scheduled or manually in real-time, it will show through.
Relationships are the new currency- a common tagline but also a truth for individuals and businesses- so the authenticity will be derived from custom content that reflects the author. While social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs can be described as an ongoing, unbounded conversation, social media scheduling has no “real world” analogue. Because of this, it provides the opportunity to participate according to your schedule, and the challenge of remaining branded, genuine and new, in a way that is unique to digital dialogue. Marketers should take advantage of the increased efficiency enabled by scheduling, but keep in the back of their minds that presence does not equal engagement, and the longterm payoff is in the time invested incultivating relationships. As with everything, moderation is key.
