PipeflowThe honest answer: it depends
How much time social media takes depends on many things: how many channels you run, how often you post, whether you take photos yourself, how fast you write and how many messages and comments come in. So there is no reliable figure that applies to all businesses. Be sceptical of claims that give an exact number of hours without a source.
What can be said, though: the effort is almost always greater than you think at first. A single post does not take that long. It is the many small extra steps nobody plans for that add up.
Where the time really goes
If you want to understand your effort, break it into single steps. For most businesses they are these:
- Finding a topic: thinking about what to write about today. Often the step where everything gets stuck.
- Finding or taking a photo: scrolling through your phone, finding a suitable picture, perhaps cropping or brightening it.
- Writing the text: phrasing the caption, rephrasing it, thinking about hashtags.
- Publishing: opening the app, pasting everything in, adding location and tags, perhaps adapting it for a second channel.
- Responding: replying to comments and messages that come in after the post.
- Everything else: interruptions, getting back into it after a break, checking later how the post is doing.
A worked example
The following calculation is a made up example, not a measurement and not an average. It is only meant to show how small steps add up. Put in your own values for yourself.
Suppose a business posts three times a week on Instagram. Per post it needs about ten minutes to find a topic, ten minutes for the photo, fifteen minutes for the text and five minutes to publish. That is forty minutes per post, or two hours per week, not counting comments and messages. If LinkedIn is added and every text has to be adapted, it will be correspondingly more.
In this example, the most time goes not on writing or posting, but on finding topics and photos combined. That is usually exactly where the most can be saved.
How to reduce the effort realistically
These levers help most businesses without the quality suffering:
- Batch instead of starting fresh every day: sit down once a week and prepare all the posts for the week. That saves constantly having to get back into it.
- Keep a topic file: note ideas as soon as they come to you, for example on your phone. Then you never start from zero.
- Build a photo stock: take photos on the side and collect them in a separate album. Searching for photos shrinks to a single tap.
- Recurring formats: fixed formats like "Question of the week" or "Piece of the week" take the decision off your hands.
- Schedule ahead: many tools let you publish posts at a set time. Then you do not have to remember yourself at the right moment.
- Fewer channels, but regularly: better one or two channels done properly than four done half-heartedly.
- Set reply times: answer comments and messages together at fixed times, not with every notification.
What you should not cut
Not every step should be streamlined away. A quick look over every post before it goes online protects you from wrong information and typos in your company name. Answering questions and criticism is also time that is usually well spent, as that is where interest can turn into a job.
Be careful, too, with fully automatic solutions that post without any control. They save time until a post goes out that is not right. A middle way, where posts are prepared and you only check and approve, is a sensible compromise for many small businesses.
Measuring your own effort
If you want to know how much time social media really takes you, keep a note for two or three weeks. A slip of paper by the till or a note on your phone is enough: date, what you did, how long it took.
Afterwards you will see in black and white which step eats up the most time. Often it is not the step you would have guessed. Start exactly there, instead of saving a little everywhere.
And compare the effort with what comes back: enquiries, job applications, guests who say they saw you on Instagram. Simply ask new customers how they came across you. That is not an exact measurement, but it gives you a feel for whether the time is worth it.