I keep hearing marketing professionals extolling the benefits of social media for businesses. I always laugh when I hear, “social media is free.” Are you kidding me, people? While I agree that signing up for accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Wordpress and the like comes at no charge, social media participation for businesses is hardly free.

First, you can’t just set up these accounts, post a few things and let them sit. To maximize your efforts, you must constantly update, tweet, friend, connect, write and reply. It’s about developing and distributing fresh content that your audience will be interested in and carrying on conversations, which takes a tremendous amount of time—and, time is money.

Also, social media is about listening and reacting quickly if your brand comes up in conversations. This takes planning and diligence in monitoring, which takes time, time you pay your employees and agency partners for. At Canyon, we developed guidelines for social media participation that our employees must abide by—this document wasn’t free to develop.

Oh, and technically, since social media tools are web-based, internet connections, mobile devices and bandwidth is all paid for through your ISPs and wireless providers.

Have you been able to spend the time to maximize your social media efforts? Has your social media involvement resulted in enough return to justify the investment? Still think social media is free?

photo courtesy: www.flickr.com/photos/Sean_McColgan