Social Media Isn’t Free: Marketing costs real money

If you are a regular reader of Online Social Media, you will know that we report on many articles which are about marketing through social networks. These articles include a success story of a small business which has been using Facebook, tips and tricks for using Twitter for marketing your business, and details about different ways to measure the success of your social media campaign.

In these articles, very often the message is that marketing through social networks is a very cheap way of marketing your products. Yet it seems that not everybody agrees with this. According to Dave Evans on Clickz.com, social media marketing is indeed very expensive. Not in terms of how much money is being spent, but in how much time is being spent interacting with customers.

He says that running an advertising campaign through social networks takes an enormous amount of time. Signing up for these services is quick and easy, but the real time consuming part is gathering followers and interacting with them on a daily basis. If your company’s CEO starts blogging regularly, then he is spending time writing those blog posts which would otherwise be put towards more important work.

For recommendations on how to carry out a social media marketing scheme and the full article, head on over to Clickz.com. Does your company run a social media marketing campaign? Does it take up a lot of your work time? Let us know in the comments.