“Facebook will boost your brand”

“People are making fortunes from Facebook”

“A Facebook fan-page brings massive return on investment”

These are just some of the absolute cock-and-bull statements that fall from the turgid mouths of people who promote themselves as “Social Media Consultants”. Yes, they do exist, you’ve seen them and I’ve seen them. Heck, I’ve even met a couple in the flesh which is why I keep a bottle of that steriliser spray in my top pocket just in case I have to shake their hands and pretend to tolerate their sweaty pale skin.

Heck, I’ve even met some certified ones. Certified!!! Yes, they have a certificate that explains that they are certified to add a ‘like’ button to your website. That’s just brilliant, absolutely brilliant, impresses me no end.

So before I go into just why they’re a complete waste of money (indeed, a waste of oxygen), let me just explain where they come from.

You know the film ‘Aliens’? Well imagine the queen alien is the economy and she sends out her troops to destroy small companies (people) during the bad times, or just those that have absolutely no idea what they’re doing and really shouldn’t have a business in the first place.

She then chews them up, digests them and through a very gory process involving gestation, mucus and internal fluids, out pops a social egg, lying in wait for a company to look at it when it will then jump on your face and violate you by pushing utter crap about social media down your bloated throat.

That’s where they come from. They’re aliens.

There are some that weren’t born alien but became alien through osmosis; they’re the ones that used to do something else but then found out how to add a Facebook page and use WordPress. They realised that many business owners don’t own a Facebook page and don’t know how to use WordPress so they barked at you until you did what they kept saying you should do.

They appear at networking events explaining how they know how to do Facebook pages and use WordPress. By the way, if you don’t even know what I mean by “Facebook pages” and “Wordpress” then you need to be careful of Social Media Consultants. And aliens.

At the networking events they get everyone excited by explaining that there are 900 Trillion Facebook users, more than the population of our galaxy and that if you could just convert 0.00002% of them, you could be RICH! RICH I TELL YOU!!! RICH BEYOND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS!!!!!!!

They know this to be true, why else would they be haggling over the £10 cost of the breakfast? THEY’RE RICH!!

Of course, they then back this up with hard evidence. They write on the whiteboard the names of companies that have absolutely taken over Facebook and are making a fortune from it. This is their proof.

There are a lot of companies too and it takes a while to write them down because their acid-sweat melts through the pens. Here’s a typical list:

  1. Facebook (Obviously)
  2. YouTube
  3. Coca-Cola
  4. Disney
  5. MTV
  6. Starbucks Coffee
  7. Oreo (hmmmmm, lovely)
  8. Red Bull
  9. Converse All Star
  10. Converse (yes, a shoe AND a company in the top ten)
  11. Skittles
  12. PlayStation
  13. iTunes
  14. Pringles
  15. Victoria’s Secret (huh-hurrr)
  16. Windows Live Messenger
  17. Monster Energy
  18. Ferrero Rocher (I’m spoiling you now – geddit, spoiling you! HA!)
  19. Xbox
  20. Nutella
  21. McDonald’s
  22. Adidas Originals
  23. Disneyland
  24. Dr Pepper
  25. NBA

And so on.

I bet you’d never heard of those before they were on Facebook had you? OF COURSE YOU HAD, I’M JOSHING YOU!!!

That’s the thing you see, Facebook is great for people who already have huge advertising budgets!

Hang on though, this seems to go against my decree that you must have a Facebook page, because believe me, you must. Facebook is essential to your business but not because it will make you a fortune, it’s just that it’s yet another type of marketing that you should make the most of.

And that’s all there is to it. You don’t need a social networking alien, dripping with acid to tell you that do you? No, you don’t. They’d just ruin the carpet.

A bucket with holes. And some social patches. Geddit? I'm a genius, worship me.

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, they’re all the same – just small patches in a leaky bucket that you need to keep fixing. Your marketing bucket will have loads of holes in it and each one should be filled with something to keep it from leaking lots of customers, including Facebook, Twitter etc. However, one of those patches won’t make you a millionaire, it’ll just mean that you may get the odd customer from it, a customer that you might not have got – and that’s the whole point of it.

It’s not hard, is it? If I had a leaky bucket I’d repair the bucket by looking for a bucket fixing specialist, not a specialist in holes that appear in the lower part of the bucket and another specialist that only does holes in the bottom of the bucket. I don’t need a range of hole-fixing people, I just need someone who can handle the whole bucket.

I DO NOT NEED AN ALIEN.

So there you go. If you don’t have a Facebook presence, it’s worth getting one. It’s not worth paying a consultant, even a trained and certified one (whatever the hell one of those is) and if you do see a “Social Media Consultant” appear at your networking event, watch out, before you know it they’ll be on your face and within ten minutes you’ll be the unwilling host of their gestating eggs, just waiting to burst out of your chest carrying your wallet.