One of the top benefits of social media is found in TIME SAVINGS.
Yes, you heard me right. TIME SAVINGS.
It’s funny that we get asked about how to “make time” for social media. But really, social media has allowed our clients – and us – to work more efficiently and produce results at an exponentially greater rate than ever before. This one simple application is very telling: We all have experienced a situation where a large number of people were involved in a registration or related process. Inevitably, some piece of information is confusing, incomplete or even incorrect. You know the day: You come into the office and the phone rings asking “the question” that alerts you to the problem. You sigh knowing you’ll spend your day answering the phone to fix this problem. Why tie up human resources (that’s code language for YOUR TIME) answering the question when you can post the question and related answer to a Facebook page, tweet the link and set your voicemail, e-mail responder, etc. to point folks THERE to get the answer. Within 20 minutes of the phone call your day has opened back up again.
We all get questions everyday in our work. What if the answers to those questions were all on-line – we post them as we answer them to the first person asking. The time savings from this alone is HUGE.
Most businesses aren’t measuring HOW they spend their time, so they don’t even notice how much time they save and/or how much more effectively their time is spent when social media are leveraged.
Beyond that, time saved by using social media to bring in business versus the long-term effort required for traditional media, the ability to speak once and touch many with a personal message, the networking power without leaving the office (not to say you never have to leave – but this can replace at least a few “hand-shake” meetings a week with greater results) and the shortening of the sales cycle (common in social media) are all huge time savers.
Photo Credit: cdammen
