This post follows on from a post that I wrote late last month called Social Media – The More You Do The Better You Get and expands on part of a list post that I wrote back in June called Social Media for My Business: 16 Lessons Learnt so Far, where I talked about some of the things that I had learnt on my journey over the last few months.

Going over the rest of the lessons, I noticed that some of them naturally bunch together so today I want to talk about three of the lessons that are about the time and commitment that it takes to build your brand in the online and social media space and what I have learnt.

The lessons that I want to expand on today are:

• This uses up a lot of time – limit yourself to a set amount of time/activity to make sure that it doesn’t take over your time.
• Do a little often – social media takes commitment and so doing a little often is a better way of getting results rather than showing up on an infrequent basis. Remember: if you only show up some of the time what does that say to your readers or followers
• It takes time, persistence, consistency and commitment to generate results – relationships, trust and credibility are not built overnight so be patient. However, don’t forget to measure your progress to see how you are doing. If not on track then do something about it.

What have these meant for me?

• Given that my aim was to start writing to build a personal brand on the internet and to write a book, initially I set myself a schedule of posting twice a week. Since starting this blog I have upped that frequency to 4-5 times a week depending on other commitments. This has taken up a lot of time but initial goal is now in sight and my book will be out in the second half of September.
• Sometimes, sticking to your schedule is hard especially if the payoff may not be immediate. But, this is where the real commitment comes in and how important your goal is to you. One word of warning though, don’t set your bar too high. Best to start slow and build up frequency rather than start too fast and burn out.
• If you have a blog, what I have realised is that generating ideas and writing them down into coherent posts are two different things. Make time for both.
• There is not necessarily a good or better time to do these two type of activities, I have found, but setting a scheduled time to work on these does help.
• I have found the use of phone applications like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite invaluable for keeping in touch with what is going on on Twitter, Facebook and Linked In when I am on the move. Use of these applications has allowed me to a little bit often, especially when I am on a train.
• Most quality relationships are built over time and so consistency of contributing to a conversation or posting new, interesting content on a consistent basis is essential to building trust.
• Building on the consistency point, I have found that keeping to a schedule and posting consistently has forced me to get better at writing, generating content ideas and connecting with people.

The point of the image and the title? I think it is very easy to be involved (ie. have a social media strategy) but being committed is much harder. Just ask the pig?

Which are you….a chicken or a pig?

Ps. Apologies to any vegetarians out there. The image was too good to pass up using 🙂 I hope you found it funny.

Thanks to dmixo6 for the image.