When talking about social media and online communities, people often ask, “How much time should I invest?” From my experience the more time you invest, the more you will get out of your online communities. Personally, on average, I spend approximately 15-20 hours a week contributing to online communities. Most of my time is spent on Twitter. If I added more networks to my list, I could easily spend a lot more time online or on my iPhone.

On Twitter you can easily track your influence and reach in a number of ways, without using any other tools, besides the Twitter website. From the Twitter website, you can track the number of followers you have or the number of times other tweeters have mentioned you. When I started using Twitter, I followed these numbers very carefully. I was very excited when people retweeted my posts or recommended me for followfriday or ecomonday. These are tags people use when they want to recommend someone to their followers. I think I pecked at ten followfriday recommendations in one day.

Then in mid June I started planning our office move. We moved on July 17th. The time I spent using social media in a given week dropped dramatically. I didn’t have time to post during the day nor did I want to be online when I got home from work.

I tried to retweet other people so I was still involved, but it was clear that these feeble attempts did not compare to the amount of time I used to spend. As a result the number of follower I had was dropping and today I only had one followfriday shout out.

Several months ago, I started checking my stats on twitalyzer. I pecked at an influence rating of 2.4 and I am currently rated at 1.1. I am sure that I can recover from these loses. But I think that this drastic decline in such a short period of time highlights how important it is to spend time working on your social media strategy. It is important to remain interesting and active. You can not build a social network and then let it be. You must continue to add content that people will want to read and communicate with them. If you neglect them, they will find new people to follow. These new people my not be better but they are investing the time and resources to get their message out and you aren’t.