Is Social Media Worth Your Time?

When it comes to telling people, your ideal customers, about your new side hustle, social media can be a great way to do that. It’s free advertising isn’t it? That depends on how you look at it; on whether you count the cost not only in pounds and pennies, but also in minutes and hours.

Before social media existed new businesses relied on mainstream advertising; paying to tell people about their services or word of mouth from satisfied customers. Then Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc. came along. Free spaces to shout about your wares. Sounds great doesn’t it, so why wouldn’t you want to use them?

In my experience the ‘cost’ of creating posts for social media, and for me particularly for Instagram, is the time it takes to do so. And when I compare that to the return I’m getting I have to question whether it’s worth it.

Whilst there are thousands of social media gurus out there telling you that it only takes a couple of minutes to create a reel, in my opinion if you want to succeed on Instagram then you need to have a strategy. You need to think about what you’re going to post. And it’s not just posting time. It’s also time to put images on stories, engage with other people’s content, keep your highlights up to date, message new followers. Need I go on?

Maybe I’m being bitter because my ‘success’ on social media has been limited, but speaking to other people recently it seems that I’m not the only one questioning whether it’s worth it. In particular, whether it’s worth the time.

So, what’s the answer? As it often is, the answer is ‘it depends’. It depends on whether it’s working for you. The most important thing is to ask yourself that question. Is it working? Is the return you’re getting worth the time you’re investing? What return do you want? Views, followers, new email list subscribers? I recently had a reel that got 18k views, but no one followed me. So the numbers meant nothing as it didn’t bring any new people into my world.

I listened to a podcast not long ago about someone who built her business without social media. She just blogged. She maximised her search engine optimisation and this helped her be found. So there are alternatives to using social media.

I recently contributed to a bundle as part of a Black Friday promotion, which added 65 people to my email list in a period of just three weeks. Compared to creating social media content it was easy and got the result I wanted. I had to give away something I usually sell and create a landing page and email sequence, but now I’ve done it once I am planning to repeat this in 2025 and hopefully grow my email list.

And guess who are the people most likely to buy from you? Those ones on your email list. So the more people on my email list the more likely I am to make sales.

So what I wanted to share with you in this post was not only my thoughts, but the suggestion that you question what’s working for you. Brooke Castillo, from The Life Coach School, says ‘question everything’. And that’s a lesson I try to implement in my life and would suggest that you try, particularly when it comes to following the crowd and taking advice from all of those great online entrepreneurs telling you how to build your side hustle.

You do what works for you. You create your own path, your own individual journey. Don’t just do something because someone else tells you to if it’s not working. If you’re investing time for little or no return, when you could be doing something else that would give you a better response for less effort, then you have to question whether it really is worth it.