How to Find True Social Media Experts?
*
How to find true social media experts? It may be harder than you think.
Just because some people have millions of followers does not mean they are experts.
There are many automated services where you can buy followers for cheap.
Follower numbers are often inflated by bots, especially on X/Twitter or Instagram.
Yet in recent years the Web has been literally flooded by social media experts.
Some social media are too new to be an expert there
You can’t escape social media experts it seems. Or SEO experts haha. Just check your SPAM folder.
There is another problem though: many social media as such often exist only for a few years.
Some claim that you need at least 10,000 hours of continuous experience to become an expert on something. You need many years of practice to get there!
How can you consider someone an expert who has just 2 or 3 years of experience or even less?
Some social media in the stricter sense – that is social media sites beyond forums and blogs – exist since around 2006.
Yet most people, especially the marketers who refer to themselves as experts joined later on.
Many social media sites exist only for a few years and then disappear.
In other cases there is a huge hype for a year or two and then they become an also ran.
Can you call yourself a Snapchat or even TikTok expert already?
Don’t you need a few years of experience first? It depends.
Also social media algorithms and rules are changing at a breakneck pace.
For example I have been off Twitter for half a year during the Elon Musk takeover drama.
Twitter – now called X – and its features changed significantly to put it mildly.
How to spot social media experts
Are there true social media experts at all? Yes, there are.
How can you spot them among the plethora of self proclaiming ones?
It’s easy. True social media experts display the following 3 traits:
Social media experts don’t call themselves experts.
It’s like with every other discipline. You can call yourself
- manager
- specialist
- professional
- consultant
or whatever but you can’t refer to yourself as an expert unless others do.
In reality only other people can call you an expert. You are inherently biased to judge your expertise.
When you call yourself an “expert” you’re simply boasting.
Thus true social media experts won’t tell you that they are experts actually. They will rather point out what they accomplished.
They may tell you how long they are using specific social media “channels” etc. They might cite others referring to them as experts in reviews or testimonials.
There is no single unified social media!
Imagine someone calling himself media expert.
What media is s/he an expert in? Print media? Radio? TV? “Multimedia”? There are
- journalists
- photographers
- graphic designers
There are no social media experts because there are no unified social media.
Social media is a very broad term containing everything you do online while communicating unless it’s email. You can be a
- X/Twitter expert
- YouTuber
- Instagram influencer
but you can’t be possibly an expert on all social media at once. That’s like being a car expert. You need to specialize at least a bit or you will be just a generalist.
Mastering even one of those sites or tools requires a huge amount of time and commitment.
How do you imagine to master all? I was a complete Facebook beginner for several years!
Then I started to work for clients as social media manager taking care of their Facebook pages.
Am I an expert now? Hardly. Just like everybody else I struggle with Facebook:
- The constant changes
- the cluttered interface
- the ever dwindling organic reach.
After a 15 years of using X/Twitter, I’m still just an advanced user of it.
Am I an expert? Just because I’ve been active on Twitter since 2008?
Judge for yourself based on my X or Twitter resources or other posts on it!
After almost a decade of using Pinterest and reaching millions there organically.
Yet I still rather call myself a Pinterest influencer. Even that is hard me!
I used Pinterest for several years and amassed 100k+ followers there.
Yet that number by itself does not make me an expert.
It also does not guarantee organic reach for my pins.
Each piece of content has to be exceptional, match the audience and context of a given site!
Real social media experts are busy
You can comment on their blog or reply to their tweets.
You can follow them on social media or subscribe to their newsletters.
Yet they won’t reply to every stranger practicing “cold outreach”.
Many influencers could be considered experts but they also won’t respond in many cases.
They stay silent not only because they use the “social media” instead of one to one communication.
Why? Are they selfish, aloof or arrogant? No. It’s because they are simply busy!
High profile influencers are overwhelmed with time consuming social media participation.
Everybody wants to talk to influencers! It’s due to a gigantic boom in social media marketing!
They have potential clients flocking to them like the gold diggers to Klondike during the gold rush.
There are simply put only a few social media experts out there!
The demand surpasses the supply by an overwhelming margin.
Want the truth about experts? Ask!
Of course I oversimplified. I might even err. My information may be outdated.
At the end of the day I may not be a social media expert myself so how can I know?
Stop looking for an social media expert who might be hard to find!
Rather search for a social media manager – that’s someone who actually takes care of social media for business people.
Do you look for or want to hire a social media manager?
Shameless plug: I do work as one for clients!
Other than that there are many lists of social media experts!
They use some more or less transparent metrics.
You may be lucky to find, approach and get feedback from one!
Just ask them whether they are experts already and someone can confirm it.
Or look up their LinkedIn profile and find out whether people who are knowledgeable about the topic have endorsed them.
In recent years I have made most of my client connections via LinkedIn.
I must have done something right over there.
* (CC BY 2.0) Creative Commons image by Neil Rickards
I sincerely disagree. There are social media experts just like there are media experts – self proclaimed and otherwise. Don’t confuse social media with the technology used to propagate it. Blogs are considered social media technology and have been around, in their earliest form, since the 90s. My Space was founded in 2003 with Facebook following in 2005 but before that we had IM & chat rooms and forums and usenet. All early forms of social media – user driven media. Heck, social media has been around since the first chamber of commerce business mixer or Rotary session was called to order. Like everything else, technology enables you to scale relationship development and networking on a massive order but it’s only an enabler. The real trick to social media expertise is in the ability to develop relationships to some mutual benefit whether personal or professional. The technology is the easy part…
Well Tom, good point but does using mailing lists since 1997 make me a social media expert? Does it enable me to do social media work? I doubt that.
Btw. I really used mailing lists back in 1997.
No, using mailing lists (which I did in 1995, btw ;-) doesn’t make you an expert but there’s a lot of bashing of social media experts without acknowledging that there truly are experts out there – people who call themselves that and actually get results from their efforts on behalf of themselves and others.
Truth be told if you can explain to somebody how to blog and what the benefits are or how to set up a Twitter account and post in a way that adds value or use Digg or Delicious or any of the myriad social sites in a way that provides benefit to your audience then, at least for that audience, you are a (gasp) social media expert whether you acknowledge yourself as one or not. I think it’s disingenuous to claim otherwise or to dispute that title claimed by others merely because they claimed it. (By the way, thanks for the response).
Its pretty simple really. Show me your case studies. You don’t have a portfolio of successes, you are no expert regardless of what you may say.
Doesnt the tag “expert” depend on how long the field has been in existance? Someone who works in a field that has only been around for 6 months, but has been there from the start could call themselves an expert i guess. Its all subjective.
right. amateurs things they are experts and pros think they are still just learning.
It normally took people to grow in a field to be called experts. They made mistakes and learned from them.
Expert is an objective word. People may be in a field for years together and still a novice to certain things in the same field.
I could not agree more. People actually call themselves experts on certain fields when they barely know anything about it just to get the trust of their clients. It is part of the strategy.
I think it’s disingenuous to claim otherwise or to dispute that title claimed by others merely because they claimed it. (By the way, thanks for the response).
It seems that these days everyone can call themself an expert. You are absolutely right with the statement that only others can call you an expert.
The minute a new word is created relating to any kind of industry it seems that “experts” will pop up out of the woodwork. Like you stated the only way you can attempt to define whether someone is a true professional in their field is to judge them on their past experience.
You state in your article – How can you consider someone an expert who has just 2 or 3 years of experience or even less? – there is the point in one simple sentence. However, the more difficult question is how many years of experience in a particular field should a person have before someone actually calls them an expert?
Is there a specific time frame whereby others decide ok this guy has put in the time and ground work lets give him the expert title. Customer feedback and referrals are the best way I have found to try to get a so called expert in the field I am after.
You wouldn’t want the plumber with a weeks experience working on your pipes when you could have the “expert” who has been physically working at the plumbing game for over 15 years. But again… what is the required time frame for expertise. Could be that the guy who has been a plumber for 15 years has not been following the new trends or products available for the industry whereas Mr just out of plumbing school perhaps is up with the latest advancements. I think the whole “expert” question is a difficult one to get to the bottom of.
However, like I said, referrals from other people are good place to start when looking for an expert in almost any field.
Rgds
Michiel
I always remember the saying… “The stranger is the expert”.
Terrible really… until you find out they have not got a clue what they are talking about :-)