This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Well, here's a question that drives a good amount of stress and anxiety for side hustlers, small business owners, and we're going to do our best to remove or at least reduce some of that concern. The question is, how much time should I spend on social media each week? And specifically, how much time should you spend trying to promote your project or connect with customers or partners? Whatever the case may be. Obviously, social media can be powerful for building a business, but it can also feel like a time sink if you're trying to do it all.
So in today's episode, we're going to help a handmade pottery business owner who's just trying to figure this out. She's feeling overwhelmed by managing multiple platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Pinterest, add 12 other networks to that list, at least potential networks that you could be on LinkedIn, et cetera, et cetera. But what do you do? Right? So she wants to know how much time she should realistically spend on social media each week and how to determine what's actually worth her effort.
Hey, great questions. Let's help this listener and hopefully some other people streamline a strategy and focus on what truly drives growth because that's what it's about. You want your social media to have an impact. If it's not having an impact, well, don't waste time on it. But hold on.
I don't want to get ahead of things here. Quick little shout out to our sponsor. Let's hear the listener question and then my answer. Hi, Chris, I'm Angela from New Hampshire. I've been running a handmade pottery business for about a year now and I'm trying to grow my online presence.
Social media seems like a must, but managing Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Pinterest feels overwhelming. I know I need to be consistent, but how much time should I realistically spend on social media each week? And how do I figure out what's actually worth my time versus what's just busy work? Well, to take a big picture of you, not just about social media, but about anything, I think it's important to be very intentional in how you spend your time. And a lot of people waste a lot of time on social media, both in terms of their own scrolling, and I'm not going to lecture you about that because I do it too.
I lay in bed at night and watch a bunch of Instagram reels. But in terms of your side hustle, that's what I'm talking about, a lot of people, a lot of small business owners, side hustlers, waste a lot of time producing content that nobody sees, believing that they have to be on a whole bunch of networks, following rules like, "Oh, I must post every day on Instagram or the algorithm will not like me." You really want to make sure you're spending your time where you're going to see an effort. So one initial thing you can do is if something is not working or you're not achieving traction on a platform that you don't really love anyway, I would just say stop doing that because you can't be in too many places, especially as a side hustler, as a business owner of one, like a solopreneur, and you really can choose just one or two primary platforms, at least if you want to do things well. And then from there, I would say realistic time budget. If your business is dependent on driving leads or customers from social media, then maybe you can spend five to 10 hours a week on it, and that's not a lot for some people in terms of creating content, posting, engaging with the audience, looking at analytics.
If you're spending much more time than that, then you really want to make sure this is critical to your business. Of course, you want to use tools wherever possible to save time, to batch your tasks, dedicate maybe one day a week to create posts for the next few days and use tools like Later or Buffer, or even Instagram now and Facebook, you can schedule in advance so that you're not scrambling to post every day. And then also, use those analytics tools like Instagram Insights to see what's working and what's not, so you can double down on successful content. That's usually the best approach for these things. If something starts to work, do more of it.
If something is not working, don't just keep trying it because it's probably not going to work the next time around. And then I think it's so important to focus on engagement over quantity. Engagement over quantity. If you've got people that are responding, liking your post, commenting, that is a huge success. There's a bigger success than posting every day and nobody sees it.
And so it's a little bit counterintuitive compared to lots of things in life where it doesn't matter if anybody sees the results of your workout or something. You're just doing the workout because it matters. But for social media, for your business, it actually does matter that people see it. And if they're not seeing it or they're not engaging, you need to do something different because your time is your most important resource, right? So I don't want you to waste time.
I want to respect your time as well. So every one of our episodes is short and action packed designed to give you some inspiration or a practical tip for your day. This was episode 2,950. New episode comes out all the time, every day in fact, seven days a week. I hope you'll subscribe or follow.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
