Social Bookmarking and Media: Just Bring Time

Social bookmarking, social buttons, social sharing, social media — the number of ways in which ‘social’ has become the new watchword in the online marketing environment is staggering. The prevalence of social buttons on every single blog posting, social bookmarking page, flash game, and business website in the entire world is such a given that even Google considers the buttons “top tier” content — there is no circumstance under which Google will penalize you for having them.

The thing about the social aspect of the Web lately is that it is designed from the ground up to rely on people who want to spend time being social. If you have a business that relies on social media for any part of your SEO, for example, you’re not going to be able to keep up unless you have a few very enthusiastic seventeen-year-old girls posting about you from their iPads.

That’s because social media, whether it’s Facebook or Reddit, takes a lot of time. More so even than traditional SEO efforts, which are already an enormous time-sink for the typical small business owner. SEO companies have entire cubicle farms devoted to social media experts who get paid to build followings on Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, and the like. That’s basically all they do, every day, for different clients — and it still takes a team of 6 or 8 of them a month to really make their presence felt.

Just as importantly for a small business, that effort can’t be concentrated. You can have one superhuman employee work nonstop for a week and get the same results, because the passage of time is critical to the development of a social presence. That team of 6 or 8 can handle a dozen different clients in that month, because putting more than a couple of hours’ work each day results in rapidly diminishing returns.

That means that having one person on staff doing the job is a no-go. Either they’ll burn out because they can’t do the job of 6 people, or they’ll hit the point of diminishing returns and end up wasting effort and money doing a less effective job than the SEO team will.

In short: social bookmarking and other social media takes time, in more ways than one — time that you can hardly afford to spend yourself. Let the experts handle it for you.