A few weeks ago, a friend of mine met with a social media agency.
During his conversation with them they told him he was tweeting too much.
They told him he needed to tweet a certain type of tweets more often and some others much less.
They gave him a bunch of what they called the “Twitter rules.”
He was kind of confused because he’s a wildly successful blogger and dominates twitter. His blog easily gets 10 times the amount of traffic I ever have. But suddenly these social media experts were telling him to do the opposite of what he had been doing.
I only had one question for him, “Does this social media agency have more followers than you?”
He said, “No, of course not.”
“Then why are you listening to them?” I replied.
Social media is too new for hard rules. Twitter has existed less than 10 years, why do we think we’re experts on it?
Is that the only thing you should use to determine who you work with from a social media perspective? No, of course not, and this idea doesn’t transfer well. A baseball player shouldn’t ask his hitting coach how many homeruns he hit this year before taking his advice. In addition, you should know that there are lots of great agencies that can genuinely help you with your social media strategy.
But don’t believe these instant experts who try to give you their made up rules about how social media works.
If their platform is incredibly tiny, be incredibly wary that they can build you a big one. If that was the case, they should hire themselves and build their own first.