Whether you have a whole social media team or you’re only allowed one hour per week to work on your brand’s social media marketing, there are helpful metrics to determine how much time you should be spending on it to see success.

Experience

When you are first getting into the social media swing of things, it is recommended that you interact a few hours a day until you’re comfortable with your social platforms. Learning the tips, tricks and shortcuts will make you and your employees faster and more effective.

Tip: Twitter hashtags and using Facebook @ mention tags are key.

Expectations

There is a ratio between how long you’ve been using social media and how much you should be spending on it a week. The longer you’ve been using social media in your brand marketing, the more time your customers will expect you to devote to it.

Are your social media accounts brand new? Spend about an hour a week

Are your social media accounts a few months old? You should average 10 hours a week

Tip: Six hours a week seems to be the average minimum requirement to achieve noticeable results.

Monitoring

If these time estimates seem high, keep in mind that it won’t be all posting, tweeting and engaging. An important element to your social media campaign includes monitoring around the web for mentions, news and discussion about or relevant to your brand.

Tip: There are many tools that make monitoring easier

• Use Google Alerts to scan the web for mentions
• Spend two minutes checking Facebook stats for new action or fans
• Set an RSS feed for a Twitter search word or hashtag and send it into your Google Reader
• Use RSS feeds to search your company name, brands or industry terms on sites like Flickr, Digg, etc. to see what other’s are finding
• Check out LinkedIn and search for questions or discussions that your company or team members can reply to