OK, so you have set up your "Buzz" monitoring, planned your engagement strategy, launched your Blog, opened your forum, set up your Twitter accounts, seeded your Facebook app, populated your Flickr group, uploaded your videos to Vimeo. Phew that’s good. However, as your role in online marketing requires you’ve got other SEO work to do and a usability study to commission and a new homepage redesign to manage etc etc etc. Hold on where does social media engagement fit in to that working day? The answer is it doesn’t! You need specialists and that is part of making your company "social media ready"

So how much time does managing a social media campaign take? At a high level in engagement you will be split between being proactive and reactive. Following is a simplified example of our experience. It is not comprehensive by any means but gives you a flavour!

The "Reactive" activities i.e. listening and moderating principally could pan out as follows:-

1. Listening and analysing the Buzz around your key topics – 2 hours per day (10 per week)
2. Moderating your forum – 1- 2hrs per day (5 per week). Depending on the number of posts. This amount of time would cover approximately 30-40 incoming posts per day
3. Flickr account management 1 hr per day (5 per week). If you have an application that uploads photos automatically for you to approve and tag or not, you might have to trawl through 50-75 images to ensure they are suitable.

The "Proactive" activities i.e. creating content and engaging with key influencers may be as follows:-

1. Researching and writing Blog posts – 2 hrs a day (10 per week). That should deliver at least one blog post per day and allow time to move your stock of 4or 5 others close to publishing.
2. Blogger outreach – 1 hr per day (5 per week). This is direct contact with your key influencers. Remember more often than not they may not be in the same time zone as you.
3. Commenting – 2hrs per day (10 per week). This is the leg work which may involve you actively in say, 20-30 3rd party forums, blogs or news sites where you are commenting on other peoples posts to improve the sentiment of your brand within your key topics.

That’s a total of roughly 45 hours a week or more than one person full time. The likelihood is that the skills you will need will probably mean more than one person. You can see that the skills required being proactive are different to those required when being reactive.

If that isn’t enough, a final thought to leave you with is that you should also remember that conversations online that require engagement, forum posts that need moderating don’t stop at 5pm when you go home or at the weekend or on Christmas Day. Social media management is a 24/7 job!

KMP’s next event is a Social Media for Beginners Workshop, which takes place on the 29th January at the MDDA in Manchester. The half-day workshop will be hosted by KMP’s Social Media Expert – Paul Fabretti, alongside Content Strategist, Dave Kinsella. Paul will be looking at the role of blogging within social media, using case studies to show how blogging can be used as an effective business tool. He’ll also use a case study to help attendees work through the tools and methodologies involved with creating a social media strategy so that attendees can build their own campaign. Dave will be exploring the world of social media and showing you how easy it is to get started with the different social media tools that are available, including social networks, photo-sharing sites, video and blogs. Already proving to be popular with companies such as The Co-operative, United Utilities and Wales Millennium Centre signed up, there are only a few places left for this complete guide to Social Media. Book now to avoid disappointment.