You’re right that it can be tough to commit the sort of time necessary to really use these tools correctly though. At the same time, if you do successfully listen and interact, and learn about how you can transition people into customers more efficiently by discovering what they think and want, the rewards could exceedingly justify the time allocation…

If a small business wants to make sure that they are listening to their customers and providing customer service through these outlets, it is not overly time consuming to get up and running and make sure these people aren’t howling into the wind (or calling a company’s phone number with no answer). Once you’re up and running especially, even under an hour a day could suffice here—-although it may be distributed over the court of the day/night, as it’s best to provide this service in as close to real time as possible.

However, if they want to further market the company and find new customers that would not otherwise call/email/tweet/etc., then there is more of a learning curve for how to do this well. There are all sorts of tools and practices that can be employed to develop relationships in which you can persuade people to become customers.

There is no limit to the amount of time that you can spend here, as you can develop an entire ecosystem in which you have a community marketing your company and transitioning people within their networks into customers. For here, once you have made the initial investments and have established processes to do this (not necessarily an easy feat), then time investment will depend entirely on how committed you are to the medium at large.

Changing a company’s business model to reflect the ongoing revolution in communication may be like turning a giant ship around—-little changes in trajectory matter a whole lot, but it still may take a long time to transition to new objectives.