Social Media Mistake #1: Being a Guru

photo credit: Made In Hollywood - You thought your kids had a lot of friends? Ashton Kutcher has 478 billion twitter followers... your kids just got Punk'd

By Matt Cook
Point.Click Media

The following is part 1 of 5 in our series about social media mistakes:

As people grow increasingly comfortable with social media and as entrepreneurs begin to realize the potential marketing power behind them related to their business, it’s quite common to get all worked up into a frenzy and start diving head first into the deep end before realizing they don’t know how to swim.

The first common mistake that can sink your dinghy before you even leave the dock is trying to dabble in every social media platform around. There are oodles out there – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Technorati, Blogger, Metacafe, LinkedIn, Flickr, Fark, Reddit… *Breath*… and on and on she goes. So unless you’ve discovered some sort of global stopwatch that can add hours to your day, spreading yourself too thin is easy to do.

You need to have focus. Every social media site has its own allure. It’s what helps give them their identities. Facebook, for example, is great for keeping up with friends and family, while LinkedIn is more for the corporate world and tracking your business contacts. Chances are that you likely only keep track of one or a few of these sites regularly. Stick to what you’re familiar with and don’t add extra work for yourself. It’s also important to research various social media platforms beforehand and focus on which ones could create the biggest impact for your business.

Next week we’ll examine the consequences of trying to be a social media Guru.