Photo by Bâ„®n

We are living in a fast paced world, where patience is not the strongest currency, and where we are used to getting everything we want with the click of a button and without having to wait long anymore for anything that we desire. Problem is, when it comes to social media, this mentality does not help. Let me share some thoughts on why you need to give it time when you are involved with social media:

Be careful when focusing on ROI

Focusing on ROI may be a good thing to do, but you have to be careful not to prioritize it over spending the amount of time required to get good results. Metrics don’t mean a thing if they don’t reflect a real connection with your customers. The only way to get a valuable ROI is to work and wait.

It takes years

When looking at social media mavens like Seth Godin, Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk, you have to realize that it took a long time for them to reach the place where they are now. It took years, because that’s the only way to be trusted. Are you ready to spend years? If not, how are you expecting to build something valuable?

You can’t rush human emotions

Social media is all about your customers’ emotions, about connecting with them in a personal level. The thing is your customers and their emotions have no rush at all. They don’t care about you being in a hurry, so you need to seat patiently if you want those emotions to be positive. Nourish them slowly and they’ll look for you.

Being in a hurry leads to over-promoting

This can be a big problem to many companies, and I see it happening all the time. One of the most important reasons why you need to be patient is because when you are not, you make bad decisions. Over-promoting is definitely one of them. You may fall under the wrong impression that with more promotion, you’ll get better results, when in many cases, leads to exactly the opposite. Over-promotion is just noise for us, and we hate noise. The world is already too noisy for you to make it worse.

It can cost more money for equal or less results

Related to the point above. When you promote more instead of playing the waiting game, you spend more time and money! And the problem is that all that money and time spent will probably bring less results because of the noise that you’ll create. Last but not least, when you look back at your results and resources spent, you might think that social media wasn’t useful at all, when in fact it was your impatience that brought a poor ROI.

If you are not ready to put the time, just quit

In the end, it comes down to this: if you are not willing to be patient and wait for us to WANT to connect with you, you should just quit. Otherwise, you are spending too much valuable time and money for something you probably will never understand. Slow but steady progress is where is at, I suggest you go with the flow.

Carlos Miceli. Argentinian. Questioner of things. OwlSparks’ blogger. Freelance writer. Entrepreneur. Every day philosopher. Skill learner.

Tags: community, content creation, Social Media, Strategy, the right way, traffic