You Are Not A Social Media Specialist/Expert/Guru

This applies to those of you who put “social media expert, “social media guru”, “social media consultant” or “social media specialist” on your LinkedIn and other social media profiles. Who are you trying to fool?

There is no such thing as being an expert in social media. Just because you know how to tweet and create a Facebook account does not make you an expert.

My 14 year old sister knows how to do all of that, I guess she should drop out of school and start doing full time social media consulting, she is an expert after all, right?

At the time of writing this, a search on LinkedIn for the terms “social media consultant” returned 131,927 so-called consultants. A search for “social media expert” returned a mere 37,269 results.

The only companies that are stupid enough to hire these experts are the companies that are the ones being run by men in their late 50’s willing to jump on any bandwagon that proclaims it will help increase sales and customer engagement.

If the companies hiring these so-called “experts” were smart, they would ask their secretary who secretly is on Facebook most of the day anyway to take care of their social media affairs without paying her any extra money.