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What if everything you "know" about social media marketing is wrong? What would this mean to your upcoming and current social marketing programs? Better yet, what might it mean to your job?

If you are employed in social media marketing, it is time for a healthy dose of reality followed by some serious soul searching and career planning. Some of you are lucky enough to work in the rare companies that create advocates with great products, service and mission and thus are equipped to leverage social media for marketing gain; most work at companies that have inflated their opportunities in the medium and are floundering with their social media marketing and content strategies.

Here's the way a large number of social media professionals today go about justifying their programs, along with some recent data that may (and should) scare the hell out of you if you work in social media marketing:

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Find out how your content compares, plus three quick changes you can make right now. Quality is a popular content marketing buzzword at the moment and quality content can be loosely defined as content that online users find valuable. Since so much of content is routed through Google and Facebook, and since they're both recently dramatically updated the way they identify and promote quality content, we thought now's the perfect time to look at how they do it (see also: What the New York Times Can Teach You About Quality Content).

How Do Google And Facebook Rank Content? The aim of both Google and Facebook is to show users content that they want to see and share with others. When searching for quality, these are the signs that they look out for:

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Last summer I was lucky enough to be in San Francisco with my family celebrating my brother-in-law Michael’s wedding. It was perfect. We spent the weekend on the Russian River with friends and family. Lovely. When the wedding was over, my family spent a few more wonderful days exploring San Francisco. One morning over coffee, my new sister-in-law Laurie who had her laptop opened, turned to me and asked me:

“What do you think about Linkedin endorsements?”

My knee-jerk response was:

“They suck.”

She seemed relieved that I had said it, and we both went on a rant why we think they suck. I thought I’d share our thoughts with you because I think Laurie is super smart, and she and I can’t be the only ones who feel this way.

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For this weeks blog, I want to help you avoid making some of the most crucial Social Media Mistakes when it comes to marketing your business online.

1. Hard Selling on Social Media

With the way online marketing has changed, the way businesses advertise also has to change. The hard selling “buy this now” through social media will no longer work. Unless you show an interest in what your customers want, your customers won’t buy.

2. Creating Social Media Accounts for fun

One of the biggest social media myths is that you need to have an active social media account on every single social platform and that isn’t the case. You need to do your research and find out where your customers “hang out” and only target those networks and make sure you stay consistent with your brand across these networks.

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Many brands are moving away from metrics that purport to measure social media as a direct sales driver. 

Instead, they're moving toward new metrics that evaluate social media strategies in terms of audience-building, brand awareness, and customer relations. 

In a recent report from BI Intelligence, we look at the no-frills but powerful metrics that social media managers and analytics companies are focusing on, we explain how the end of the vogue for ROI has not meant a pullback on social media budgets (in fact, social media budgets are ballooning). And we dig into some of the misconceptions and misuses surrounding the more common reach and engagement metrics popularized by Facebook Insights, the built-in analytics dashboard for Facebook pages.  

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I’m a brand. You’re a brand. Tom, Dick and Harry? Brand, brand, and brand. 

But Tom started it. Yes, I'm talking about Tom Who-Wrote-a-Ridiculous-Number-of Non-Fiction-Best-Sellers Peters.

It was 1997. The web was just a baby. Maybe you were too. I was no baby, but I was practicing personal branding. I just didn’t know it. I had started my business just two years prior, so I was brand-building semi-obliviously.

In an edition of Fast Company magazine, in an article titled, “The Brand Called You,” Tom Peters declared it a brand new world. He wrote, “To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”

Seven paragraphs later, he said, “The web makes a case for branding more directly than any packaged good or consumer product ever could.”

Then he made a bit of a crystal ball statement. “When everybody has email and anybody can send you email, how do you decide whose message you’re going to read and respond to first and whose you’re going to send to the trash unread? The answer is personal branding.”