The social media monster and you – does it distract or does it help your work?

‘Social media disrupts productivity’ is the key takeaway from a new study by Red e App, who teamed with Nowsourcing to give us new data on how using Facebook, email and Twitter sucks the profitable output from employees.

Did you realise that there are over 1 billion posts on Facebook within a 24 hour period? Or that reading email consumes 28 percent of the average worker’s time? Or that one million new Twitter accounts are added every day?

These statistics do add up to a lot of time spent on social media (405 minutes spent on Facebook every month, they say). But they don’t take into account how social media can help us do our jobs.

Sure, there is zero benefit to productivity if people are going off to play Farmville. But how much time does social media actually save organisations?

“Here’s one small example,” said David Karr, when talking about this subject on Social Media Today. “I can go ask my group of industry professionals for help with a certain task – and they’ll always point me in the right direction. Five minutes of networking and I can save days, sometimes weeks of work.”

Karr further argues that the savings far outweigh the losses. “If you have an employee that’s abusing their time on social networks, what would they be doing if social media was NOT available?” he asks.

“You’re kidding yourself if you think they would have been working.”

What do you think?