Once your business has jumped on the social media bandwagon, you may begin to notice that the law of diminishing returns has set in where you’re not getting as much out of your social media interaction as you once were. Use the tips below to redirect your social media efforts to maximize the marketing potential you achieve for your business.

Think about your social media marketing like any other business practice and assess it periodically to determine whether it’s serving the purpose you had for it. Especially when maintaining, updating, or creating new content has become burdensome, weigh the benefits you can attribute to the social media marketing to determine its ongoing value to your business.

Look over results you’ve gotten from surveys or other measures of how your social media marketing has worked for your customers to determine whether you’ve gained significant business through your use of social media. The information you consider can range from tallies you’ve taken from customers regarding where they heard about your business to how they’ve contacted your business. While metrics are frequently emphasized in the marketing world, in reality, your own assessments may be valuable because metrics from social media marketing are frequently inadequate or unavailable or simply ignored by businesses.

Calculate the amount of time you’re spending on your social media, or the amount of your business marketing budget devoted to hiring experts to help manage your social media. The cost of much social media is cheap compared to other forms of marketing which is one of its greatest appeals.

Calculate any increases in costs you’ve incurred from social media because of changing platforms or fee schedules from specific providers. You should also assign a value to your time and calculate the cost to your business of the time you spend on social media.

Determine whether you’re using your social media tools as frequently as you were initially for your marketing efforts. Once the novelty’s worn off, many businesses find themselves reducing their use of social media from several times a week or even a day to fewer than a few times a week.

Determine whether you can change your approach to social media marketing to better use the accounts you’ve got set up or to better generate meaningful content and messaging through your social media before deciding to simply stop using it or deactivating it.

Consult with others or do research within your industry to see how others are using social media in your field to see whether shifting your approach to social media marketing might generate new interest in users.

Consider contacting someone to speak with about your social media account before terminating your account in order to thoroughly understand what it would take to reactivate you account, rather than relying on automatic deactivation tools.

Social media marketing can reach a point where you’re not sure whether its value to your business is worth continuing your efforts. Use the tips above to determine whether you’re ready to reduce some of your social media marketing.