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
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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?

@Ryan – EXCELLENT COMMENT – VERY WELL SAID – I AGREE 100%

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…

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.