A lot of Orlando business owners mistakenly think that in order to be effective online using social media marketing, they have to spend hours and hours each week on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

That's really not the case though. Sure, it's true that social media can take up a great deal of time. However, how much time you spend each week depends on 2 things:

1. What your goal is.

2. How familiar you are with the sites and tools you're using.

Let's talk about your goals first.

The biggest challenge that many local business owners have is getting started without a plan. They go online to a site like Facebook full of optimism and excitement, then they're shocked to find out they spent a ton of time online and got no results - and of course they claim that social media doesn't work.

The fact is, too many people make the mistake of being way too "social", and forget about the "media marketing" part. You have to be clear on what you want to accomplish.

Ideally, what you're shooting for is to put out some sort of good, valuable content to people. This can take you anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours each week, and it really depends on how engaged with your market you want to be and what form that content's going to come in. It could be something as quick as responding to a few questions or comments on your Facebook page, or maybe something more involved like shooting a video or putting together a free report.

But here's something a great deal of people aren't aware of -- a lot of your social media marketing efforts can be automated or shared with others. For example, you can outsource the writing of your articles and blog posts to a freelancer online for as little as $20 a piece. There are also tools available that take your article, blog post or video and automatically upload them to hundreds of social media sites online at the click of a button.

In addition to that, did you know that you can have Google email you every time they find something about your business? All you have to do is go to google.com/alerts and tell it what you're looking for; it could be your name, your company, even your competitors. You might just want to stay current on things in your industry. In any event, tell it how often you want it to update you, and how many results it should send you. After that, all you have to do is verify your email (or log into your Gmail account if you already have one) and you're done!

Once you've got your plan in place, you also have to keep in mind that when you're learning something new, it takes a lot more time than when you know exactly what you're doing.

For example, I'm not a web designer, but I've taught myself enough to get by. When I first started, putting up a blog and making modifications to it took me hours upon hours, because I was researching things as I went. I also made a lot of mistakes, which ate up even more time. But the more I got familiar with the WordPress platform, the easier things became and the time it took for me to make updates to my blog got shorter and shorter.

The same goes for social media. It'll take you some time at first, but the more and more you use sites like Facebook and Twitter, things will go more quickly and you'll be able to get yourself into some sort of routine that fits your schedule.

To wrap things up:

• You don't have to spend a ton of time on social media marketing to be effective.

• Be sure to have a plan, and make sure that plan involves putting out good, valuable content.

• Leverage outsourcing sites and automated tools to save time.

• Don't forget to take into account your learning curve.