Social Media Myths – Why Your Blog Will Suck, Facebook Won’t Make You Money, and No One Will Read Your Twitter Posts

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Hurry! Don’t Be Left Out of The Social Media Revolution!

Blogging is Fun, Easy, and Profitable and in the Future Everyone on the Planet Will Have a Facebook and Twitter Account. It Might Even Be Required by Law!

Sure sounds great, huh? The social media marketing hype machine is in serious overdrive. The biggest promoters are reporters who don’t have any real life experience with it or those who make their living promoting it. Like the entrepreneurs who twitter about how to use Twitter or bloggers who blog about how to make money blogging, it’s a bunch of self-serving hooey!

Building and maintaining a social media profile is not fun or easy. It’s a lot of work. Like more work than you can imagine.

Like the fresh young couple who’s about to have their first child but they have no idea what’s really coming. The older parents will tell them just how hard having a baby is, only to be met with “Yeah, sure…we know it’s hard…we’ve read all the books…but we’re ready!”

Then four weeks after the baby is born that same couple says, “You know, we though when you said hard we understood what hard was, but this is incomprehensibly hard. Like hard to the second power!”

Making social media marketing work for you is that type of hard. Well, maybe not that hard, but harder than you can understand at the moment because you haven’t been through it yet.

Or perhaps you have and you really need to read something that makes you feel better for burning out so quickly and failing to meet even your most basic social media marketing goals.

Either way, this post is for you.

Blogging

What the Hype Says:

You HAVE to get a blog! They’re great for your business and really good for search engines. There is nothing better than a blog for increasing your search engine rankings. Google just loves blogs and it will help drive traffic to your goods and services. Plus it’s a great way to keep in touch with you customers!

Here’s What Will Really Happen:

First you’ll install Word Press in a subdirectory on you main website. If you’re lazy or too scared to do that, you’ll probably sign up for a free account on Blogger.com.

You’ll spend a full day just picking your colors and themes and figuring out the admin panel. You’ll change the title and subtitle of your blog at least five times and then change it again a week later. But it’s ok because you are so excited about your new blog you’ll hardly noticed that in eight hours you’ve accomplished nothing.

The first week you’ll post four times. You’ll also send emails to everyone you know announcing that you are now officially a blogger.

Your first one will be some lame “I have a blog now” post. Your second post will be about how this is your second post and how exciting it is to blog. Your third post will be about something that’s been bugging you for years and how glad you are to get it off your chest. The fourth one will be a comment about something you read on another blog.

The second week you’ll post two times.

The first one will be about how exited you are about blogging for the second week. The second one will be a plug for your business. You really wanted to do that last week but you were concerned it would look too self-serving.

You’re still pretty psyched about the whole blogging thing and even though you’re posting 50% fewer posts this week than last, you’re still pretty proud of yourself because that’s still 100% more than your “once a week” promise to yourself.

The third, fourth and fifth weeks you will post nothing. You’re be too busy and the initial adrenaline rush is gone.

The sixth week you’ll post just once. It will be an apology about how you haven’t posted in the last three weeks after promising you would. Of course, no one is reading your blog, or even cares, so this is really an attempt to make yourself feel better for failing. The irony of writing a blog post about failing to write a blog post will escape you as you are just too defeated to care or notice.

Out of curiosity you’ll check your Google analytic stats from time to time and notice that not only is no one visiting your blog but it has done nothing for your search engine rankings. In fact it’s made things worse because instead of your home page coming up for your favorite key phrase, Google now thinks your weird self-serving blog post is the most relevant match. Bummer!

For the next 48 weeks you’ll stop telling anyone you have a blog because it’s such an embarrassment.

At month thirteen you’ll delete the account entirely because you’re so sick of Google showing that lame blog post.

Facebook

What the Hype Says:

What a great way to connect with your customers and promote your business! It’s so easy and will all the free apps and plugins you can really generate a lot of leads and sales. It’s practically a license to print money! Plus it’s really good for search engines. Google just loves Facebook!

Here’s What Will Really Happen:

First you’ll go over to Facebook and set up an account. It won’t be long before they hit you with big question “Do you want to import your email address book and see if we can find them on Facebook?”

“What? I thought I was just setting up a simple account. I might not even like Facebook and my address book has hundreds of addresses from people I’ve only corresponded with once”

So you’ll check NO.

Then you’ll spend the next four hours picking your profile photo, adding your contact info, your bio and perhaps a few choice photos. There that wasn’t too bad.

The next day you’ll get a friend request. The name is somewhat familiar so you click on the link.

“Ah, now I remember…I haven’t seen him since high school.”

You remember that he was a pretty cool guy and most likely not crazy. His list of friends seems normal too so you accept. Immediately his latest posting appear on your ‘wall’.

“Wow, that’s pretty cool”

The next day you’ll get two friend requests – both from old high school friends. One you knew petty well and you left school on a good note. The other was more of an acquaintance and maybe not all that mentally stable. However, it seems rather rude to include some high school friends but not others. It’s just a Facebook page, so why not?

The following week you’ll get three requests. All from people you don’t know. One is hawking some junk through an MLM scheme, one is a random programmer from India and one is Michelle, a friend of a friend. Michelle seems stable enough. She’s a bit hippy-dippy but harmless, so you accept that one but ignore the two trolls.

The nest day you get four requests; one from Ariel Sunshine, one from Jacuzzi Forrest, one for Jeremiah “See You at Burning Man” Johnson and one for someone who goes by Kermit. That’s it, just Kermit.

“Man, you let one hippy crash on your couch and the whole clan shows up at your doorstep!”

You’ll want to cut of this flow of space cadets but you just don’t have the guts to un-friend Michelle. It’s not her fault her friends have no boundaries. Plus she’s connected to your high school buddy so you’re kind of stuck.

You could choose to “ignore” the other requests but then that would allow them to send one again. So you just leave them in your inbox: the permanent limbo land for Facebook friend requests.

So you’ll start to try and promote your business. After all, that’s what all the hype is about. It’s time to tap into the Facebook cash cow.

But how do you do that? None of your “friends” are prospective customers. You could form a group but then you’ll have to recruit members and actually maintain it. Not likely. You could join a couple of groups or become fans but you’d still have to put in several hours a week just to build up some kind rapport so you don’t get pegged as some desperate troll.

On the 28th day you’ll receive a request to play Texas Holdem from the sketchy high school friend.

“Uh, no thanks. I don’t like to play cards in real life so why would I want to play online. Plus I got a wife, two kids and business to run. Is he serious?”

As you continue to you expand your friends list, things start to spiral out of control.

Someone has sent you a basket of fruit!

“Uh are you serious, this is not REAL fruit. Why the fuck are you sending me a digital basket of fruit? Am I supposed to feed this to my avatar?”

Are you against breast cancer? Then sign my petition and say NO to cancer.

“Uh that’s great but I don’t think cancer pays any attention to your useless grandstanding.”

I HATE MONDAYS! Join our group!

Jenny has sent you a back rub! Click here to accept or give her one back!

Become a fan of my pointless self-important project!

“This can’t be real. Don’t these people have jobs? I don’t have time for this crap.”

By this time you’ll want to chuck the whole experiment and close your account. The problem is you really do enjoy the gossip among you’re closest friends. The ones you know in REAL life and have REAL history together.

One of the reasons you joined was the promise of improved search rankings. After all, EVERYONE says Google loves social networks. So you check your Google analytic stats from time to time and notice that you are you lucky to get one Facebook referral per month and they have a bounce rate of 100%. Meaning, they back out and leave after landing on your site. And your rankings? Well they haven’t budged. Of course, no one told you about Facebook’s policy of placing the “nofollow” attribute on every hyperlink so Google won’t assign it any value.

So you start ignoring every friend request from someone who isn’t on your A-list, deleting your Facebook email updates without reading them and abandoning all hope of making money and promoting your business through this beacon of mindless of chit chat.

Twitter

What the Hype Says:

You have to get a Twitter account. You can reach millions of people with little or no effort! Just make little posts that link to your products and watch the money flow in. Plus it’s great for generating buzz, keeping in touch with your customers and increasing your ranks in the search engines. Google just loves Twitter posts!

Here’s What Will Really Happen:

First you’ll go to twitter and set up an account. You don’t know yet that the user name you pick will also be the account name. So when you preview your new account and notice how cheesy your user name looks, you’ll cancel it and start over.

That’s better; your second try looks much more respectable.

Next you’ll try to figure out something to tweet about. You can’t think of anything yet, so you log off.

The very next day you’ll get a notice saying that Candy is now following your tweets.

Wow, one follower already and you haven’t even posted a tweet yet. This social media really does work!

So you click on her user profile and you see a picture of a hot chick. She’s following 14,651 people, but has only one tweet. How weird. You click on it and it’s a link to her member’s only web cam.

On the third day you’ll get a notice saying that Crystal is now following your tweets. You’re excited but still a little gun-shy from yesterday.

So you click on her user profile and you see a picture of another hot chick. She’s following 156,317 people and has two tweets. Well, that’s one better than Candy. You click on the first one and it’s a link to her member’s only web cam. The second one links to a Viagra store. A fine example of “market synergy”.

On the fourth day you’ll get a notice that Christi is now following you too. Three days and three users and still no tweets of your own. Ho, hum. Delete. If she’s legit you’ll find out soon enough when you log into your account.

On the fifth day you’ll go to see Avatar 3-D and you’re just blown away.

“I know”, you think to yourself, “I’ll tweet about this!” So you log on to your account at home and start typing.

“Avatar 3-D is just amazing. The special effects are outstanding, the story is fast paced and exciting and the 3-D effects completely immerses…”

“Huh? Minus 1…what does that mean? Oh I get it, I ran out of characters!”

“Ok, let’s see… Avatar 3-D is just amazing. The special effects are outstanding, the story is fast paced and the 3-D effects immerse you completely.”

“There, that fits with eight characters to spare. Now to put a hyperlink to the movie’s official website…http://www.avatarmovie.com/”

“Dammit! Now I’m twenty characters over. I didn’t know URLs counted. How lame!”

So you’ll rewrite it.

“Avatar 3-D is amazing. The effects are outstanding, the story is fast paced and the 3-D effects immerse you. http://www.avatarmovie.com”

Not a good as the first draft but you still hit all the main points.

You’ll hit update and look at your work. Awesome, your first tweet. Unfortunately your only followers are three prostitutes, but hey, it’s a start.

You’ll post another seven times over the next week and half before figuring out that you can use a service called Bit.ly to shorten the URL’s so you have more room to write. Great, but now you need to go to Bit.ly every time you want to shorten a URL and then cut and paste the shortened URL into you tweet. How friggin’ stupid!

After another month you learn that you can create a Bit.ly account and post your tweets directly to your Twitter account. Better, but now you need to get into the habit of just using Bit.ly instead.

Over the third month you’ll pick up a few more random followers but they are all the same. A few tweets of their own but following thousands of people. WTF?

By the fourth month you’ll stop tweeting entirely as you discover that the 140 character limit makes not only your tweets lame, but everyone else’s as well. Heck, your own tweets bore you to death and you wrote them! So you put it aside and wait for the day when you just want to use it to promote a niche market via links, which is the only thing it’s good for unless you are a celebrity.

LinkedIn

What the Hype Says:

You have to get a LinkedIn account. It’s the place for SERIOUS professionals who want to connect with other SERIOUS professionals. The networking possibilities are endless and it’s not full of crap like Facebook. Plus it’s really good for search engines and improving your rankings. Google loves LinkedIn.

Here’s What Will Really Happen:

First you’ll go to LinkedIn and set up an account. There’s a lot of stuff to fill out so you’ll be there for a while – much longer than is comfortable. So long your shoulders will hurt. Maybe you’ll post a resume or a bio of some sort. I guess it’s time to dig out all those old Word files and start assembling a coherent history of your professional life.

You’re encouraged to fill in the past jobs so you’ll do that as well. Of course, you got to have a picture, but this is also your “professional” profile, so it’s got to look halfway decent. That means no photo taken by yourself with your arm stretched out above your head, even if it is the “hottest” photo you’ve ever taken. So instead you’ll scan a family portrait you took at Sears and crop out the significant other and kids. You look stiff but respectable. You can still see a tiny bit of your significant other’s shoulder in the shot, but you’re no Photoshop guru, so it stays.

After a couple of days you’ll get your first LinkedIn request. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s an old co-worker of yours and they’ve started a new business. Do you accept? Heck yeah! Wow, this is so much better than Facebook and Twitter!

The next request is from an old college buddy. She’s now at a really cool start-up. Do you accept? Heck yeah!

Finally a social network site for SERIOUS people. No more bullshit.

The following week you’ll get a LinkedIn request from Mallesh Singh. He’s a programmer from India and he wants to join my LinkedIn network. Mallesh…Malleeeeeshhh…it just doesn’t ring a bell.

You don’t want to add just anyone, but at the same time it feels rude to officially “deny” his request, so you just leave it in your inbox and hope it goes way quietly.

The next day you’ll get one from Jessica Rainbow. Who? Ah, it says here she found you through one of your Linked In connections. So you do a little research. Seems Rainbow is connected to your college buddy. Well if he trusts her, then I suppose I can.

The next week you’ll get a LinkedIn requests from the CEO of Blue Mountain Healing Potions. He’s linked in to Rainbow, who you are now linked into via your college buddy.

The company is unrelated to your profession and you don’t know him even casually. However he is the CEO of a pretty successful but airy fairy company. Could be a good connection someday.

But you choke and just decide not to respond. You leave it in your inbox and hope for a revelation on how to handle it.

Three months later and still no revelation.

The next wave will be the recommendation requests. Because you’ve worked in a corporate environment for so long you’ve rubbed shoulders with a lot of people. Most you can’t remember, but they sure remember you. And they want to rub shoulders again. A lot of them are now out of work and they are desperate for recommendations. Anything to give them a perceived edge in the marketplace. But your name is going on this too, so there’s no way you’re putting you ass on the line for some temp worker who was passing through on a work visa or a company man who you had lunch with once three years ago. It feels weird – like not giving a bum money when they are clearly needy – but you got your own rep to think about too.

After a year you’ll get really good at just ignoring all the trolls looking to indiscriminately expand their network and the “brother can you spare a recommendation” beggars. You’ll no longer feel guilty or obligated to answer borderline requests.

There needs to be at least one online profile where you maintain a semblance of control and dignity and LinkedIn is where you decide to draw the line. You will not let this one devolve into a crapfest.

Out of curiosity you’ll check your Google stats and you notice you’ve had exactly one visitor from your LinkedIn account in six months. You’ve had no job offers, made no meaningful connections, and had nothing to show for it but an increased level cynicism.

But what about your search engine rankings? Well they haven’t budged. Of course, just as no one told you about Facebook’s linking policies, no one explained LinkedIn’s policy of placing the “nofollow” attribute on every hyperlink so Google won’t assign it any value. Bummer.

Then it hits you. LinkedIn is not about social connections. You already have the emails and phone numbers for anyone you really want to contact anyway. It’s about credibility. Your LinkedIn profile is a statement to the world that says “I’m not a loser, a creep, or a wannabe. Here are my credentials and here are my recommendations. Look, I have seven of them, and all from CEOs biotch!”.

You also realize that all the people on LinkedIn who are making it work, are REALLY working to make it work. It’s like a second job, but you don’t want a second job. You have enough jobs already. But business street cred is pretty important so you decide to keep this one. However, you’re not going to put too much effort into it as you have a real business to run with real customers. Virtual connections are cool but they can’t have priority.

The False Promise of Social Media and Why You Should Still Do it Anyway

I’m not trying to get you abandon all hope of leveraging social media to your advantage. It’s quite the opposite really. I want YOU to SUCCEED. Really I do. Cross my heart and hope to die. It’s just that the hype of easy money is just that, hype.

Having profiles on the major social networks sites is like having a yellow page business listing in the 1980’s. Not something you actually wanted to do or pay for, but it was expected. But paying $15 a month for a bolded listing in the phone book had a much different effect than paying $200 a month for the half page color add. One was clearly a half-hearted effort. The minimum that was expected. The other one was a statement. A serious attempt to sway opinion and establish credibility and market leadership.

How you market your online profile is up to you. Are you looking for a bolded listing or a serious statement? There’s nothing wrong with a modest goal of a bolded listing. Except for my blogs, that’s exactly what my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles are: bolded listings in the phone book. But if you’re looking for the half page full color ad then you got some serious work ahead of you.

Setting up a blog, or Twitter or Facebook account is easy. Making it work is hard. The good news is the more you do it, the better you get. Posting becomes easier and your writing becomes sharper. You get better at reaching out with confidence and better at deflecting the trolls with grace and style. But even then the results are not guaranteed. What if no one wants or needs your product? What if your services lack any key differentiators to compel someone to switch to you? What if you writing is dull or you have nothing really useful, important, or entertaining to say? What if you’re just not that likeable?

These are largely overblown fears. I have yet to find anyone who was passionate, knowledgeable and sincere who was also dull. Passionate people are interesting and expert opinions are always appreciated. But it’s a crowded market and your audience has a seemingly endless options to choose from. How will you be that choice?

Make no mistake; this is a competition for attention. This is not socialism. This is raw capitalism and popularity is the currency. There are no minimum guarantees and no one is going to level the playing field for you. And if you’ve read this far, hopefully I’ve gained just a fraction of popularity over the other choices out there about this subject. Perhaps I can be your choice.

Maybe you’ll notice the cool “share this” buttons at the bottom of the post and tweet it, Digg it, or even mention it on your blog. Maybe you’ll help push this post higher up the SERPs so I can reach even more people. If I work hard enough, and what I have to say is useful and relevant, I may be able to tilt the playing field a smidgen towards my direction.

That’s all I’m trying to do and that’s what you should be doing too. Getting a blog is not an accomplishment. However getting someone to read a 3,800 word essay is.

Yeah, I win!

File Under – Social Media Marketing Myths – How to Make Social Media Work for You – Making Money with Social Media – Should You Have a Blog for Your Business – Blogging Tips – Twitter Tips – Facebook Tips – Business Blogging – Marketing Your Business Through Social Media – The truth About Social Media