Mar
24
Whether it is on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Draugiem or cv’s and brochures, you will encounter people who will call themselves a Social Media Expert. Or worse: Guru. If there is one thing you should know, it is that you should stay away from them if you want to do something with social media. Almost invariably, self-proclaimed Social Media Experts base their expertise on the fact that they know how to update a Facebook status, or send a Tweet. And that it looks nice to have a lot of followers. In fact, the advice you will get is that the most important thing is to get as many followers/fans as possible. Having a lot of those is real success and your business will flourish.
Well, I’m not an expert, but I think that having a lot of followers or fans does not pay any bill. The presumption for the importance of numbers of followers is that the higher that number, the more your social media messages get shared, and the more popular your brand or company becomes. This believe is rooted in the same mechanisms that make direct mailing work: the more letters you send, the higher the chance someone will buy something from you. However, in social media terms, sending unsolicited messages is called spam. And spam is not only generally ignored, but the source is also deemed to be untrustworthy. Not something you want for your image. Plus, the mechanism, based on the underlying premise of broadcasting, does not work in social networks. People like or share the things that add value to them, things that enhance their own image or things that entertain them. And those things originate very simply in you providing an excellent product or service, and a great customer experience. You need to provide quality that adds value to your customers, then they will share your stories.
So now we’ve established that getting people to promote your product or service, you simply need to make that of high quality. You need to focus first on making your product something that people love. But is that then success in social media, if many people promote you? Well, you’re on your way, but not completely there yet. The next step is converting that into something that really benefits your business. How does people sharing your stories translate into more sales. Or how using social media to engage with your customers translates into reducing costs in your customer service operation. In other words, how does your activity in social networks contribute to the profitability of your company. When you’re venturing into social media, that is the thing you want to evaluate it by. And if you’re looking for expertise to help you with that, avoid the people calling themselves experts, but find the ones that others refer to as the ones able to bring you results. Also, look for the ones that want to help building the expertise inside your company and set goals that bring tangible business results.
This post has appeared earlier in the March newsletter of the American Chamber of Commerce.
First of all, it is impossible to call a person “social media expert” just because he/she knows “how to update a Facebook status, or send a Tweet”. A real social media expert knows how to use Facebook insights, how to read effectiveness of each post, how to make your content relative to your fans/followers. A real social media expert will tell you how to use Facebook ads, why your stats go up or down on certain days and what promotions comply with Facebook Promotions Guidelines, without which you’ll say goodbye to your Facebook Page because of acting against the rules.
A real social media expert won’t claim “that the most important thing is to get as many followers/fans as possible”. He/she will tell you that as long as you don’t keep your fans/followers related to your service or product, your fan/follower number is irrelevant. The expert will tell you how to keep your mass interested in your product or service and how to enlarge your mass. He/she will use statistical data and marketing strategies to do that. He/she will help you to turn your product into a story, which is the most important arsenal for a social media marketing strategy.
Here, you use a rhetorical fallacy: First you define a bad social media expert, you generalize it to all of them and finally you excommunicate all social media experts from the marketing scene. It’s funny to see how people think that they can run a social media campaign just because they have a few friends on their Facebook profile and know how to create a Facebook page.
It’s not that different from claiming to be a good ad-man just because you know how to use a video camera and your friends like your wedding videos. Good luck with that.
Dear Ismael,
Thank you for your comment. And you are right in what you are saying. It is almost exactly the point I was making. Also, looking at the local market I’m operating in, but it goes for more markets, you can make the generalisation that people who call them selves social media experts, are exactly the kind you and I don’t consider to be experts at all. The fallacy, as you call it, is of course a generalisation, but I actually see people like this operating too much, and more importantly, I see companies hire them. The exaggeration in this post is mainly for their benefit: to make them understand that using social media is about so much more than having a specific number of followers or fans.