Can social media “experts” be trusted?

There has been a lot written about fake news and influencers buying followers - nothing new there - it’s been going on for some time, only seems to have been exposed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. 

THIS IS NOT FAKE NEWS – one of the very biggest sporting rights holders in the World, whom I won’t name, signed a deal with Cambridge Analytica not long before they were exposed. They got lucky, Cambridge Analytica messed them around on deliverables so the cord was cut – phew. Imagine.

Anyway, I am not here talk about fake news, fake followers, but fake Social Media "experts".

We recently undertook some analysis, for a client, of authors on twitter with the most mentions on their accounts of #socialmedia. The data brings up quite a few legitimate companies and a lot of social media "experts”, be they companies or individuals. Analysing the data closely shows a pretty strong theme – namely, most of the "experts" that appear in the top 100 have tweeted a lot. When I say a lot, I mean at least 100,000 times, often more than 500,000 times.

Digging deeper we found that most of these guys retweet – they have nothing say for themselves, they just pass on others information – more often than not.

Not only that but most of them got 0 interaction – yes, 0, for a social media "expert" – just what you’d not expect.

But there’s more, not only do most them not post anything original, post a lot of regurgitated stuff and get no or virtually no feedback, they also have very few followers.

Go figure. These guys are not very expert with their own accounts. A social media "expert" that has few followers on Twitter after posting over 100,000 tweets, or many more, how can that be?

Next time you are looking for a social media expert, take a close look at the numbers, or better still come to us and we’ll cut through the junk for you – believe me there is a lot out there.

I certainly would not trust someone with my companies social media that – and this is a real example of many – has:

Tweeted 850,698 times, has 4,928 followers and is following 2,396 – in our view the ratio of followers to following is an important figure – we net them off.

And their last 10 tweets got 1 share, nothing else, no likes, nothing.

This is not unusual, from "experts", sadly.

I am a great believer in social media from some perspectives, but what I think has happened is slightly different to what many people think has. It is a commonly held belief that social media has helped democratize many industries, such as creative – everyone can become a creative, or so it goes.

There is no doubt this is true, take a look at video production. The old school filmmakers that have dominated TV production have been caught with their pants down by YouTubers that get the kind of interaction they could only hope for.

Almost everyone is raving about the BBC series, the Bodyguard, except, so it seems, Teressa May, our embattled PM and Cressida Dick, the Met Police Commissioner, who said she thought it fake, “I just thought this is ridiculous when he took a pass at the Home Secretary.” Really, when she ran that division, she had remove one of her officers for having an affair with the Home Secretary’s, at the time, wife. Now, that may not be the Home Secretary, but it is pretty damn close.

The Bodyguard has been getting 8m viewers, which in these times is great, compare that, however, with a self taught make-up artist that also makes videos of herself, getting 28m views for one of her YouTube posts - that's right, 28 million.

It seems as though the mainstream has been producing just that, mainstream, but people want see something that relates more to them, which of course the powers in the TV and film industries have just not understood - or could never monetise.

So yes, social media has helped discover new talents, but one of the biggest problems with social is it can be gamed very easily. As many of the social media “experts” are and have been clearly trying do. They mostly have no better understanding of social media than my mother and she’s never been near it.

What my mum is good at though is offline fake news, she’s a master at convincing people she’s – in her 80s – taken up skateboarding for example, she should have got into social media, she’d get a lot more interaction than most guys we find talking about themselves as – SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERTS.