Search for Social Media Expert on search.twitter.com – go ahead. I’ll wait. There is amazing amount of people that talk about how to use social media and social media tools – on social media tools. Lately it’s felt a bit like an echo chamber, with thousands of people regurgitating the same articles on their own networks. And that’s made Social Media Expert a dirty word.
It’s very easy to set up an automated stream that will send out any article related to Social Media 10 times a day. But that doesn’t make a person an expert and it doesn’t really add anything of value to their network after the first few posts.
People that use the tools in the most effective ways are not just re-tweeting articles blindly. They’re reading posts, commenting, conversing and deciding if those posts are worth sharing. Will MY network find value in this post if I re-tweet it? Has this already been said 20 thousand times before? Those are the big question you should ask before each tweet.
There’s a lesson for businesses here. They need to bring value to their network. Whiles sales and ROI are certainly the end goals for most brands, those are the long-term byproducts resulting from the time invested in building relationships. To succeed in this space you MUST bring value and have dialogue. That takes time, but the good news for consumers is that you can’t automate those things.
