The Truth About Twitter & Social Media Experts

posted on Dec 01 by Tim Conley in the Social Media Marketing category

The video below has much more truth in it than so called social media experts would like you to believe. It’s funny and true–well mostly true. After the video, read some hard-hitting, no-holds barred commentary on social media you won’t find elsewhere.

What can I say? As Roseann Higgins, of Entrepreneur’s Forum & Women’s Power Lunch, says, “Phoenix needs a rebel like you.”

Here’s my rebel yell…

There are basically 4 types of social media users:

• The Twitterati Seeker: builds attention & leverages it for some other monetization effort.
• The Expert Follower: Says whatever is the prevailing social media mantra or whatever will get her hired to train you on how to use Twitter.
• The I Digg It: People just enjoying the technology to stay connected to their niche of interest and chatting with friends and family.
• The Skeptic: Skeptics are interested in getting some real benefit from using social media. These tend to be business owners who have limited time or money to throw at new marketing tools. There are a few SM experts who fall into this category.

The Twitterati Seeker is someone seeking Internet fame through social media tools. This can work, but with all forms of celebrity only a few ever make it. Gary Vaynerchuk falls into this category. I respect him as a business genius, but where I think he falters is his touting of the “always on” approach to social media.

There are some high-profile social media gurus speaking at conferences and corporations and getting paid big dollars who spread this crap about being as connected as possible. Well, it worked for them, right?

The reason I think it’s crap is that if you are not trying to be Internet famous, you have little reason to be an always-on personality. They are preaching what worked for them to gain their guru status, but not the things that have seemed to work for regular businesses.  Real businesses actually need their leader leading and not twittering the day away.

Oh, and when they do mention real life examples of getting a return on investment it’s usually a regular business that they had nothing to do with. The poster child for this is the Korean BBQ truck that tweets out its location and people flock to it to get some grub.

Broadcasting, which is what this BBQ company does when tweeting, isn’t “having a conversation” or “engaging” with people. It is advertising its location. But the Twitterati Seeker will tell you that broadcasting/advertising to your followers doesn’t work. Well, they are right. It doesn’t work when you are trying to build a fan base to launch a book or speaking tour or get people to watch your video podcast.

The Expert Follower makes up about 99% of social media experts. I bet most have never run a real business before their debut as social media gurus, read more than 2 books on marketing or do any testing to see if what they are saying works in the real world.  Since they are trying to make a living from social media consulting, they are trying to make it sound harder than it really is.  Talking to people, even with 140 characters on Twitter, isn’t difficult.  Time consuming, but not intellectually challenging.  These people will cost you a lot of time and money and probably ruin you on social media, which would be a shame for your business.

The I Digg It isn’t that important to this discussion except that you may find quite a few customers in this group.

The Skeptic is what you should be with all of your business initiatives. You need to test. See if the idea actually translates into results out in the real world.

Tactics that seem to be working for more than just a few lucky gurus and attention whores is customer service, reputation management and highlighting promotions & business communications such as blog posts.

But the notion that businesses are building relationships is a dodgy one.  Most people are not that interested in having a relationship with the people they do business with.  Though I think if you can develop connections with some of your customers they can become huge brand evangelists.  There is some real promise in this.

There is a lot of hoopla about Twitter.  A lot of people trying to make money off of you by claiming their expertise and telling you it is really difficult and you need to invest time and money into it.  Keep the following in mind when planning your social media efforts:

• 69% of American adults (probably your market) don’t know what Twitter is.  That doesn’t mean 31% are using Twitter–they’re just aware of it.  Worldwide there are anywhere from 20 million to 50 million active Twitter users–Twitter doesn’t distinguish between spammers, people with multiple accounts and individuals.  50 million is a big number, but that is worldwide.  The odds are small that more than a few percent of your market is on Twitter.
  [edit] Just found an article from Mashable posted in September that estimated total US adult Twitter users by end of 2009 to be 18 million or about  7% of adults in the US.
• You can participate on Twitter by broadcasting useful & entertaining tweets and by ‘listening’ for conversations related to your business or areas of interest.  You can chime in with helpful suggestions and just to participate much like you would at a networking event.  If you straight out pitch people, they will be turned off by you–you’ll get the opposite of your desired result.  [listening is setting up Twitter search feeds so you can be alerted to these conversations]  By listening, you don’t have to be always on.
• Followers on Twitter are not the same as prospects and customers.  Many people who are following people are just hoping you follow them back.  We are still in the early spam stages of Twitter much like the early days of email marketing when huge lists were thought to be valuable.

You may think I’m down on Twitter, but I actually do like it and find it somewhat useful though not the panacea or even a game changing innovation.  You should make sure you test Twitter in your business with a sound strategy on how you intend to monetize your efforts, which could be to increase customer service, drive people to your store or website or generate brand awareness.

Here is an interesting article that may be a bit more balanced than my take on Twitter: Copyblogger.com

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