Social Media Snake Oil Sales Pitches Are Full of It
By Duncan Wierman on Sep 2, 2010 in Gurus Exposed
One of the biggest marketing trends in the area of Internet marketing is using social media to get traffic and awareness about your business. Most business owners want to use social media for their business and start to look for help but the problem is that it seems everyone is touting themselves as a social media consultant. It’s hard to figure out who to trust when everybody claims that they’re the expert.
So how do you figure out which consultants to work with? First, you need to separate from the people who walk their talk and the people who just talk. Anybody can use social media sites but have they used it to promote their own business and for their clients? Ask the consultant on how he personally used social media as well as for references to other clients.
Next, you need to find a consultant that knows how to use the different social networking sites to its fullest capacity. Using Facebook is much different from using Twitter or maintaining your own blog. There are different strategies that need to be put into place in order to build a following and communicate with them. Likewise, you’ll have to set up different things for a blog such as commenting, RSS subscription, social bookmarking features, and more.
Third, find out if the consultant can measure the results. So you’ve set up a Facebook and Twitter account but did it really translate into sales? Some businesses are looking to communicate through multiple channels but small businesses need to turn their marketing into profits. You need to find an expert that knows how to use these mediums to bring in more sales.
Fourth, look at their presentation from their portfolio, personal site, and background. A qualified consultant should have a good portfolio for you to look at, a well designed professional site, and can verify any experiences they had working with well-known clients or businesses.
Fifth, ask them what they’ll be doing to help you make the most of social media. You want to get an idea of what’s involved. Find out what their plan of action is and what kinds of services are being offered. You should also read some articles on social media from a trustworthy source to see if the consultant knows what he is talking about.
In conclusion, you have to be careful about hiring consultants that claim to be social media experts. It seems like everyone is trying to jump on this trend and make a profit out of business owners that want to use social media to move their business forward.
Go through the steps outlined in this article and verify as much information you need in order to make a solid decision and hire the right person. Hiring somebody that is qualified and has delivered results can really help you utilize social media to its maximum capacity.
I have to laugh at some the the real estate gurus promoting social media – Jokers .. What they know of social media marketing is downright laughable. Let me ask you if you got any deals done with using their much hyped social media marketing courses, and training. I am putting on record to call out gurus tagged here!
- Duncan Wierman
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September 2nd, 2010 at 1:21 am
Start with 1….build it up. Then move on to another. Part of the problem is there so many out there. There’s *never* 1 site or 1 method that works across the board. Where Twitter works for Joe, Facebook instead may work for John…etc. etc.
September 2nd, 2010 at 3:22 am
I completely agree with this post! Investors really need to get off the social media hype and focus on REI because the ROI isn’t worth your while in most cases. In the real world if you’re 90 days late and hopeless why in god’s name would you like a page that’s “We Buy Houses!…” to show up in my facebook info and my friends streams? Or continue to follow someone with any sort of interest that plugs away automated tweets that are carbon copies for that matter? In that case I would be compelled to remove him from the sites I frequent because I care about what feed I’m getting and over time I’ll remove more and more of your streams from mine.
It’s scary to think about how many people never consider reverse engineering where their target market is, neglect to really dig into analytics, or formulate the two with ROI.
My initial litmus test is whether or not they thoroughly review and identify the importance of conversion.
The whole “Get Followers! Followers! Followers!” from “Gurus” is akin to the “Have everything done automatically!” mantra we’ve recently been assaulted with between Freedom$oft and $IM$, I hate the truth in the words of Zig Ziglar that state emotion will always out perform logic and that’s what these ‘gurus’ work in,,, they may come and go, but emotion as a whole will always have an opening for the next “guru.”
So much of social media is simply logical. If you use the functions for their intended purpose and think big to hold consistency with purpose while connecting with your kind of people you’ll at the very least be inching in the right direction rather than running blindly into some guru’s rabbit hole. If you’re going to go down the wrong road, at least take the time hammer it out yourself and fail because you’ll learn a heck of a lot more.
Out of all the guru’s out there on social media selling social media there are only a handful I’m sure are doing well for themselves. Compare that to the number of people claiming to be social media guru’s you should just forget that dream given the competition alone. FYI the ones who are successful aren’t new and have fluency in almost everything internet marketing. No semi retired factory worker who is now a realtor with twitter updates feeding his facebook, linkedin, and myspace account is ever going to be worth your time…
September 2nd, 2010 at 8:35 am
@Ryan – EXCELLENT COMMENT – VERY WELL SAID – I AGREE 100%
September 2nd, 2010 at 11:46 am
Timely article Duncan, who you listen to is as important as knowing the right questions to ask. Problem for more people that are just now starting social media is knowing who to listen to. We only know as much as we know until we know better
today
Though we work to get your social media to the top of the search engines and do not claim to be social media experts, (we leave that to the Guru’s, lol) what we do very well is teach you how to get your social media to the top of the search engines. It’s not rocket science (quite frankly, that would only be a distraction), but it does take work. We came up with the 5 things you should be asking .. check them out at http://seo-alien.com/articles/the-best-seo-methods-for-top-search-engine-optimization/ and keep rockin! Congrats on 99,000+ hits on your blog last month… when is 100,000?