There is a lot of hype out in cyberspace about social media management. Every social media manager/guru on Facebook or Twitter who is selling the latest “Get Rich Quick Social Media Study Program” will tell you that all you have to do is whip some text together on a couple of the social media sites and you can retire to Barbados with them, sucking down Pina Coladas as you occasionally peck out a pithy quote to your growing list of friends and followers.

This may be an odd position for a social media consultant to take, but it’s an honest one. I am good at building lists of followers, great at creating content, and terrific at managing customer interactions for my clients (if I do say so myself).

BUT …

I have not yet found that social media activity actually translates to increased sales, or even increased web traffic for a small or micro-sized business, the very people who need that most. The only people I see claiming that are the social media gurus. I have looked into a number of online classes, and they all repeat the same hype and bumpfh, but none of them really give you any secrets for making a buck or even getting your signal out of the noise cloud. If you have found one that you are not affiliating for … email me. If you are hyping or marketing one, send it to me, and I’ll review it. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong about this.

Social media sites do offer the opportunity to improve customer service, increase your brand awareness, and better engage with customers, but that part should be a no-brainer. The rubber meets the road in the pocketbook. You and I can do that stuff on our own web sites. We don’t need Twitter or Facebook for that. The only ROI the social media sites truly offer us is one more place to be found. Otherwise, they are actually a resource negative.

As a marketing effort so far I have found Facebook and Twitter to be a monumental waste of time. At this point, I don’t think anyone is really making a decent buck in social media except those people who are selling classes! I’ll be willing to dramatically revise that assessment if someone can clue me in on how it’s done. And please don’t quote success stories at me like “Look at Aston Kutcher!” … that guy was already famous before he found Twitter. I’d say Twitter has benefited more from him than he has from them. There are occasional (and usually bizarre) exceptions … but I want to know how they succeeded in turning their social media traffic into profits.

Right now I tell my clients the only reasons to be on FB and Twitter are to offer improved customer service, build their reputation, possibly increase brand awareness, and engage with existing customers. I tell them it is one more place they should be found to have a presence online, and I can help them do that. But until someone shows me a working model of how to reliably translate those presences into profit, I will continue to advise them to spend only a minimal amount of time and effort on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social media platforms as part of their marketing campaigns.