Social Media Experts...are they?

It’s more and more common to find social media experts or gurus everywhere. If you Google ‘social media expert’ you will get about 1,180,000 results.

What makes them experts? Is it because they are on social media every day? Or because they are traditional marketing or advertising gurus now into social media? Or maybe because people pay them for their help?

Calling yourself a social media expert doesn’t make you one, that’s for sure.

Social media is so new and so rapidly evolving, how can there be so many experts? It seems to me that very often passion is confused with expertise, a particular danger with a domain as new as social media. Some other times people embrace social media thinking that this is a job they can easily do at home to make money.

Wouldn’t be social media ‘professional’ be a better term?

So I ‘spied’ on a lot of gurus and experts (yes, also the emerging social media experts in Oman), it was a long and sometimes funny research, and I found out the following:

• When clicked on social media icons on their email signatures or on their websites I found that very often the links were not updated in months, or worse, they were not working at all.

• When asked how they successfully used in the past Facebook or Twitter for a client they could not really give a clear answer.

• I asked about Google+. Most of them now include it in their list of services but no one could tell me the benefits and give me an example on how to incorporate it into an online media plan.

• To some of them using social media means sending messages out, not engagement.

• Some of them claim to be an influencer; their Facebook pages and/or blogs are dead...no comments, a few followers/fans.

• The same influencers post or re-tweet other people’s articles and news.

• They could not give straight answers on how to track and measure success.

• Most of them send automated messages (which in my opinion go against the nature of social media).

• Lastly, most shockingly, they guaranteed immediate results!

Read this old article which says that, back in 2009, there were already 445 social media gurus, 68 social media stars, 340 internet marketing gurus, and many more. Not surprising then that today we have millions!

I blog mostly about social media and that’s for passion. I do a lot of work on social media on behalf of clients but I do not call myself a guru and I wouldn’t like to be called as such. I’d rather use the word ‘professional’.

How many experts do you know?