Social media marketing can be one of a business owner’s greatest tools. It can be extremely effective at acquiring new customers and maintaining old ones. Unfortunately, it can also be a big time waster. It’s easy for business owners to get sucked into social media marketing and spend so much time there they neglect other areas that need their attention. There really can be too much of a good thing. Here’s a look at ten social media marketing time-wasters you might be guilty of:

1. No focus. Today, nearly every business has some kind of social media presence. It’s just what you do when you start a business. As a result, many business owners get into social media marketing simply because they know they’re supposed to. A better reason is to get into social media marketing in order to accomplish specific goals.
2. No strategy. Along with having no focus, many business owners do social media marketing without any kind of strategy. If you’re avoiding mistake number one, then you should have some specific goals to work towards. Use those to guide your social media marketing strategy.
3. No schedule. When you don’t have a scheduled time to work on your social media marketing, one of two things can happen. First, you never get around to it and your efforts are wasted. The other possibility is equally bad, you end up spending too much time working on it and you don’t accomplish anything else.
4. Not enough tools. Most social media platforms offer some free tools for tracking your effectiveness. Usually these few tools are insufficient. To really use your time wisely with social media marketing you may need to invest in some better tracking tools
5. Too many tools. On the other hand, some marketers make the opposite mistake of having too many tools. Trying to use too many tools will only distract you from your marketing efforts.
6. No delegation. As you acquire more followers on social media, it may become too difficult to handle your social media marketing campaign on your own. If you try to do it all by yourself, there’s a good chance you’ll be spending way too much time online and not enough time taking care of the other aspects of your business. It’s better to hire someone to handle some or all of the social media marketing campaign.
7. Failure to schedule posts in advance. Trying to come up with what to post can be one of the hardest things about social media marketing. If you schedule all your posts for the week in advance, you’ll spend less time staring at your computer screen deep in thought.
8. Getting caught up in chatter. Social media marketing is about creating relationships with customers. A great way to do this is to engage in conversation with them online. If you have a lot of followers on social media this can easily become a huge time waster. Make sure you’re not getting sucked in to the point that you’re neglecting other responsibilities.
9. Paying too much attention to notifications. If you’ve got a mobile device that dings every time there’s a notification on your social media account, chances are you’ll be pulling out your phone and getting on your social media page throughout the day and getting distracted from your work. Have a set time each day to go through all of your notifications at once.
10. Failure to engage. Finally, the biggest time-waster of all is simply having a social media marketing campaign if you’re not going to engage with consumers. Without that, all of your efforts are a waste of time.

Source: forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/08/05/the-10-biggest-social-media-time-wasters/