If you’re thinking about marketing on Twitter, you might be looking to enlist the help of a Social Media Expert. But beware, being able to call yourself a “social media expert” requires little more than having the cajones to do so. There’s no formal education and the industry itself is so new that few people outside of it understand the jargon well enough to know who’s making up words as they go.

What a social media expert is NOT is someone who has a lot of followers on Twitter.

Many social media experts point to the fact that they are effectively marketing themselves on Twitter as proof that they can help your business. The biggest problem with that theory is that there is a big difference between getting people to pay attention to you, and getting people to give you money.

Marketing is always about increasing revenue. Always.

Attention and popularity does not necessarily equal more money.

When you’re looking to hire a social media expert, talk to them about engagement rather than number of followers. Can they prove that they know how to convert a Twitter stream into action? Do they even know how to track actions that happen outside of Twitter?

The bottom line is that if you’re looking to integrate Twitter into your marketing plan, what you want is someone who has demonstrated expertise in using social media for marketing and/or selling stuff, not someone who is simply an expert on using social networking sites.

Britt Reints is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch, a full service content marketing agency serving hundreds of clients and thousands of writers since 2000.

Image from michaelschechter.me

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Content Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.