One and a half staff needed to look after social media channels

By James Bennett, Head of Content, Melcrum

“Spend less money on social media tools within an organization and there is less reason to prove ROI”, said Richard Dennison, senior manager, social media at telecoms company BT, during a webinar yesterday afternoon. According to Dennison and many other practitioners there is little evidence of social media initiatives within organizations proving a return on investment. But surely they should, particularly if recent research on the amount of time it takes to maintain social media channels is true.

A study by CloudSpark, a US communications strategy company, has discovered that it takes a minimum of 65 hours a week to maintain four social media channels for one brand. Many social media channels maybe considered “free”, but if this is accurate (and not an April Fool), the time you need to create, develop, and maintain those channels is far from free and would take 1.5 full time staff to complete.

CloudSpark surveyed 40 “social media practitioners” from the external and internal spheres, and questioned them on the hours they invest in social media for their brands or the brands of their clients. In the survey it defined the following: creation – setting up the page with initial content (this doesn’t include creative design team hours); development – attracting followers, initial promotion/launch; and maintenance – listening, responding, posting, messaging, inviting.

I’d love to know just how long it takes internal communicators to maintain their social media channels. Please leave a comment on the blog or drop me an email at james.bennett@melcrum.com.

Here are a few stats from the surveyed practitioners and the time they spend on social media for a single brand:

Planning
Social Media Research: Eight to 25 hours
Social Media Planning: 10 to 20 hours

Blog
Creation: 10-15 hours
Development: 40 hours
Maintenance: Five hours/week

LinkedIn
Creation: One hour
Development: Five to 15 hours
Maintenance: Three to 10 hours/week

Facebook (Fan or Group Page)
Creation: Three to 12 hours
Development: 10 to 50 hours
Maintenance: Seven to 15 hours/week

Twitter
Creation: One hour
Development: 15-40 hours
Maintenance: Three to seven hours/week

YouTube (branded channel)
Creation: Three hours
Development: Five to 20 hours
Maintenance: Two to seven hours/week

Comments

[Richard Dennison]

James,
I think the word 'maintenance' here is very misleading ... if by 'maintenance' CloudSpark means 'particapting' in social channels then surely the internal comms (IC) people are just doing their jobs - what needs measuring, if anything, is how effectively the IC people are communicating and engaging with their audiences, not the channels themselves. Do IC people measure ROI of e-mails they send out ... or websites they manage ... I doubt it.

I think if IC people are spending a long time 'maintaining' the content in social channels, then the channels are not working as they should ... maintaining content sounds a little too much like controling content to me ...

Richard

[Cris McGrath]

Very intersting. I would like to see stats on Government 2.0 and social media involvement.

Also, when you say ‘maintenance’ are these this 1.5 staff responding to the incoming traffic or sending the requests throughout the organisation which therefore increases the work-flow and resources required?

[Rachel Allen]

Interesting post James, personally I'm curious to see what half a person looks like... I agree with the 'maintenance' comments above. It's good to see data outlining average timings as this could help comms professionals build business cases.