Time to link, blog and tweet?

Apologies for being so quiet, the office has been busy and I also went to Cork to meet with these guys: ThinkTank

Number 1, what a great name for their business, Number 2, how refreshing to meet a team of truly talented, fun and down to earth people and Number 3, yes going to Cork does feel like going to a different country! More on ThinkTank soon.

Being out of the office and then trying to catch up with things on my return has eaten severely into my tweeting, blogging and linkedin time. So one of the things I'm going to recommend to you, valued reader, is how much time each day it makes sense to devote to online business networking.

It's all very well to spend (recessionally-quiet) hours each day building an online profile but if you're serious about it then, even when you're busy doing 'real' work, you need to maintain some level of reliable and regular presence.

Here's the breakdown of time I'm currently spending on online networking:

- Blogging is the least time consuming (once you build up the habit). Having said that, this might depend on how much you enjoy writing. If you don't, then think of delegating this to a colleague. The time consuming part of blogging is reading other people's blogs, which is a necessary in order to stay up to date and maintain your industry knowledge (which in turn enables you to blog well). Maintaining a reasonably up to date blog is currently costing me 2-3 hours a week.

- Linkedin had been looking very easy on the hours, until I began to join some groups. Now the topics for discussions are all around, difficult to resist and very time consuming. I think I'll have to keep fine tuning the number of groups I belong to, and aim to partake in an average of one or two discussions every week or so. I'm aiming for 2 hours a week here too.

- Tweeting is extremely time consuming, and still difficult to get to grips with. I'm still not sure if I'm going to recommend twitter as an valuable networking tool for business - I need to give it more time (more on this soon). In the meantime though, I'm going to try to restrict myself to three hours a week.

All in all that adds up to seven to eight hours a week. Ridiculous. For a small business owner/manager, this is simply too much time to spend on one aspect of marketing.

So, I'm going to try to figure out how to cut that time down (possibly dropping twitter altogether?!). Stay tuned for more on: how to cut down online networking time and get a real-life life...