Shameless self-promotion is what gives network marketers a bad name. You know the ones I'm talking about. It's the neighbors that are always talking about the next get-rich scheme or the new business opportunity.

You see the same thing in certain people in your circle of friends. They are always talking about what they are up to. They are always pointing out the cool things their kids do or talking about how great they look. They are the ones that are always giving advice but never want to hear what you have to say.

You see this behavior in subtle ways, too. Sometimes it's as simple as too many selfies on their Facebook page.

It's a fine line we walk. We have a natural need to be noticed. We want what's important to us to be noticed by others. In business, we have a message that we want to get out and so we decide to start telling people. When people don't notice, we start to speak a little louder. We start to speak a little more often.

Then, along comes social media. It's seems so easy to start telling more people. We talk about the great things we are doing. Then, before you know you, you've crossed the line from informing others about what you are doing to spewing forth shameless self-promotion. We become more and more noisy. We send people notes that say, "Please repost." We have a need to say the same things over and over again like the dog at the side of the table that jump up and down over and over again until you finally pet him.

One of the biggest challenges with social media, especially when it comes to business, is that we tend to forget there is actually a real person on the other end. We begin to desensitize ourselves to the fact that we are not simply writing in a journal that gets hidden under the mattress.

As a result of the physical separation from the reality of real life, we have a tendency to share too much. We have a tendency to become a bit too braggadocios.

I say we, but I'm really talking about those that have that propensity in real life. Just like alcohol accentuates who we really are when we get drunk by removing inhibitions, social media does that for us online. The ease of posting and the immediacy of the response cause us to forget all reason. We get some idea in our head and have to post it.

Take a long hard look at your social media presence and do your best to look at it from an outside perspective. Look at how many posts you are talking about yourself versus talking about and to other people (in a positive way). If you find yourself talking about you and not giving truly valuable information then you need to reconsider what you are doing.

Now, there is a legal component sometimes in all this. In some industries, such as finance, you'll be limited by the lawyers who simply don't understand the way life works. That forces your hand a little bit. That can be a very good thing.

The goal is to get others to write more about you than you write about you. You might have to recruit some of your friends or those in your networking group. Ask them privately to share your message with their networks. You will instantly have more credibility. You'll curtail the unnecessary self-promotion and you'll get further ahead.

Oh, if you are awesome, people will naturally want to promote you. If you don't care about other people or simply suck, you'll need to fix that first.

If you are awesome and surround yourself with people who are awesome, you'll never have to promote yourself. They'll do it for you. You might have to plant a few seeds but it will happen.

When I consult with people and businesses about social media, one of the topics that always seems to come up is that of follower count. They look at my follower count and I get questions like how did you get so many followers or why would 38,000 people follow you.

The first and more important thing to understand is that unless you are a celebrity of sorts, building followers takes effort. Even many celebrities have to actually put work into it. The second thing to understand is that only a certain percentage of the people that follow you will ever take action on what you say.

When we think about second reason, we also should understand that the percentage of people that will take action on what you say relates directly to the quality of your followers. The higher the quality of followers, the more action they will take. The more people who are your fans, the more they will do something with the information you put out.

With any event, online or offline, there is a certain point where you have enough attendees to make the event take fire and become a great event. Sometimes, getting that critical mass is easy and sometimes it's a little more difficult.

Think about a concert you might go to. If the venue seats 10,000 people but only 2,000 show up, the concert will lack a certain amount of energy. It will lack that energy simply because of the lack of people. You put those same people in a venue that will hold only 2,000 people and the energy level changes.

Social media is no different. When you have 100 people that follow you on twitter or 25 friends on Facebook, there is at least a psychological barrier for people to want to follow because they don't know if you are worth it until other people think it.

When you work on follower building activities for any of your social media channels, you need both quantity and quality. You start with the quantity. You start by getting shear numbers. At some point, you'll hit a critical mass of followers, among them will be some quality. But, as you look for people that are the quality followers, those that are more likely to action on what you have to say, it will be easier because you'll have a bit of credibility.

Now, there is a risk when building your follower count. That risk is fake followers. You'll never want to employ the tactic of getting fake followers. A fake follower is generally an account that is built for the sole purpose of ginning up your numbers. Getting a fake follower is not an accident. Someone actually has to set up a process to generate the fake accounts.

A high fake follower count greatly reduces your credibility and can undermine your goals if you are not careful.

I recently found a site that identifies how many fake followers your Twitter account has. You might consider checking it out here. When you find a fake follower, you should really work to trim those accounts out by blocking them. That forces them to unfollow you.

The problem is that most people or businesses don't want to block them because they think it sends a bad message to force their follower counts lower and blocking users. Personally, I think it sends a worse message to have accounts following you that are fake.

When considering how you build your audience, remember that quantity is important to build some perceptive credibility but the real goal is to build quality. Quantity is simply a tool to make that a reality.

You remember the kid in school who didn't smell so good and was never clued in. Perhaps you remember the kid who was a little too loud and didn't seem to care that everyone thought he was a little obnoxious. Perhaps you were that kid.

You also remember the kids in school that seemed to know how to act to stay popular. In fact, they seemed to understand the game so well that they couldn't do anything that would make them diminish in the eyes of everyone else.

There is something about being self-aware... knowing your limits and knowing when to push them.

Social media today is a similar phenomenon. Sometimes, companies just get it. They jump on the social media bandwagon and intuitively understand how to interact. Others have a hard time just getting started let alone maintaining a social media presence.

The reality is, getting started is the hard part. There may be times when you feel like you are posting status updates or tweeting to an empty room. Just when you feel like you aren't getting anywhere, it's time to take a step back and look in the social media mirror.

Here are a few key areas to look at when making sure that you are aware of yourself on social media. Ask yourself the following questions about your brand:

Who is your company?

This is more than just what are your products and what do you sell. Ask yourself what your company stands for? How do you want to be known?

What makes your company different?

What makes you really stand out from your competitors? Don't just assume you know but really discover what makes you different. How are you incorporating this into your social media content, sharing, and engagement?

Are you reactive or proactive?

Do you just post social content at the spur of the moment or do you think about it first? If you have an end goal in mind from your social media participation think about it before you post. You need to be more proactive and not just post because the moment strikes you.

Have asked others to rate you?

Take the opportunity to ask others (those you trust) to tell you how you are doing. The reality is, you'll never be as self-aware as you think you'll be. Ask people you trust to tell you where you make mistakes and actively work to improve.

Bottom Line

Social media for business takes time because it requires some forethought and a bit of self-awareness. When you take the time to understand who you are and what you stand for, participating in social media for your business will be that much easier.

When was the last time you posted on your social media channels? I'm not talking about when you posted a picture on your personal Facebook page. I'm talking about on your company's social locations.

Too often, a business leader gets the idea that it will be important to start doing social media. They'll get the secretary to create the pages for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and perhaps a few others (Pinterest, YouTUBE, etc). They'll get the web guy to put the links on the website. They'll even take some time to post for the first week or two.

Then, the efforts will stop. Think of the Twitter accounts that started strong then just a week or two later there were suddenly no more tweets. Or, worse the accounts that simply have a bevy of automated posts. You know, when they post to one location and then have the interwebs taking care of the rest?

An inactive Facebook or Twitter page symbolizes that you simply don't care about the image of your company. If a user comes to your Facebook page in hopes of gaining a more in depth knowledge of your company or trying to find out about upcoming events but finds that the last post was made two years ago, that user will most likely not take you as seriously as another company that is maintaining an active presence on social media. Letting your social media presence wane shows lack of commitment, follow-through, and indicates you are just plain lazy.

In fact, it might be better to not have a social presence if you aren't going to maintain it.

Here are some easy status updates or tweets that can be posted in no time. These simple ideas will help keep your social media active and a good start to helping you become awesome.

1. Ask your audience a question to solicit engagement (don't forget to reply when they answer).
2. Talk about upcoming events and things your company is doing in the community.
3. Talk about new products or specials that your company is offering (don't do this exclusively or you will become a spammer).
4. Post about events in the community that everyone can enjoy (e.g. a local sporting event or a play coming to town).
5. Post pictures of company events or fun things happening in the office.

Posting something about the weather or even just saying, "Happy Friday!" will do more for your online brand than not posting at all. Remember, there is a huge difference between being on Facebook or Twitter and actually being active on social media.

Don’t let your online brand suffer from an inactive social media presence.

A few months ago, I wrote a post titled, "You Can't Automate Social." Even though people do it all the time, they shouldn't. But, I know why people try.

Social media is hard.

Don't get me wrong, posting to one platform like your own Facebook account is easy. You simply say the first thing that comes to your mind (which you hopefully won't regret later).

Social media for business is very different than social media for personal. You have to step outside of your personal way of thinking and now think about your business and communicate that to very different audiences.

When thinking about the time it takes to post coherent meaningful messages to even just your main social networks it can be a very time consuming process. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn can take a lot of time to post, monitor and manage. Now we add other platforms like Google+, Instagram, Vine, Trip Advsior, Yelp, Google Place Page, etc. and we need a team of marketers are required to even figure it all out.

I get it. Automation makes things so much easier. Posting something to just Twitter then having it automatically repost to Facebook, LinkedIn and perhaps other locations sounds pretty compelling. It also becomes compelling to have automatic posts from your blog posts so that you don't have to do the work to tell people about the post you just spent 45 minutes putting together.

In my opinion, this is a lazy way to market your business. If social media is that important to you, then you shouldn't automate anything unless you have automated in such a way that still honors your audience.

For example:

The same message to all your platforms: bad.
Scheduling an audience specific message to each platform: good.

I thought I'd make an attempt to identify the common audience types for each of the three main networks. Understanding these audience types might help you understand why the same message for all three platforms is a really bad idea.

Twitter

Twitter started as a social network with the intention of just saying what you are doing right now. In fact, like Facebook, it's intent was to have your username as the subject of a sentence. You might still see people with this old school approach to tweets or status updates like: @corey_smith is drinking chocolate milk.

It didn't take long for Twitter to be more of a micro-blogging platform. Micro being the operative word. In 140 characters you can say everything you want. It leads to some bad spelling and grammar but it's intent is for you to be pithy or concise in your communication. It's not meant for diatribes. It forces brevity.

As a result, the audience expects that. They don't want to see a majority of your updates linking to other locations so they can finish reading your thoughts. They don't want to see long-winded discussions over multiple tweets.

The audience tends to be younger and a bigger fan of text messaging (although text messaging is 160 characters - traditionally). You'll find a greater level of tech savvy in your Twitter audience.

Because of this, your posts need to be very prescient. They need to talk about what is happening now and not dwell on the past. In 10 minutes, your audience will never see that post in their timeline so it has to count in the moment.

Facebook

Facebook users tend to be a bit more long-winded than Twitter users. This is not saying anything bad about Facebook users but they have the space to opine and therefore they do.

You'll find a greater quantity of images and videos in Facebook because the platform allows them.

While Twitter followers tend to be people you won't necessarily know, you are more likely to be connected to people you know in real life on Facebook. I know that's not always the case but if it's your personal profile, you are less likely to interact with people you don't know on your Facebook page than people you do know.

Facebook users expect a little more personal interaction and often tend to be less forgiving to political or religious rants. Your Facebook audience will tend to be more family oriented

Because of the way Facebook users interact, your posts have a greater likelihood of being seen long term. If your images are compelling and your video links are meaningful, your audience will be more likely to read longer posts. In fact, your posts can be more blog-like and text heavy and people will read them. However, pictures and videos are going to get you the best results.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the least social of these three social networks. LinkedIn has come a long way with their groups feature but it's still a bit complicated to track certain users. Part of that is because when it was originally built it was more of a giant Rolodex online and now has incorporated many of the successful elements from other social networks.

Your audience on LinkedIn will naturally have more of a business mindset. They are going to be more interested in talking about their industry or topics that will help them grow in their career. Because of this the two most common uses for LinkedIn are for sales professionals to connect with business owners and purchasing managers and in the job-recruiting field (both job seekers and recruiters).

Your content for LinkedIn on your personal page, your company page or in the groups should be more professionally driven. Your updates and posts can be short and concise like you might find on Twitter but it must be geared toward your professional audience.

Summing it up

When writing for your various social locations, make sure you understand your audience. Don't try to have a once size fits all approach. It's not a good idea and will just indicate that you are a lazy marketer.

Above all, no matter which audience you are writing for remember to pitch less and contribute more. No one likes that guy that's always pitching his product.

Don't be that guy.

It’s always a good idea to shop around a bit when you are considering hiring someone to perform a service for you. The challenge, very often, is knowing the right way to make the decision.

Usually, we try to guard ourselves against paying too much. We worry so much about paying more than we should that all too often we’ll choose a lower cost provider. In the absence of understanding the value that someone provides, you have to make your decisions based on the only information available. That usually defaults to price.

When was the last time you guarded yourself against paying too little? Did you even consider that might be a problem?

In the world of web, you’ll find prices all over the board. You’ll find services all over as well. The challenge is that there is no real standard to guide what you are doing. It’s not like buying a tire, an iPad or a chair. You can’t properly compare side by side because there are so many factors besides price to consider. You simply can’t compare apples to apples.

I, like most people, get plenty of spam. On my website (both this website and my business website) I get hit up by search engine optimization and social media spammers multiple times per week. They all tell me that they’ve researched me, followed me for a while and know they can help me do better. They are full of something I can’t mention on a family safe blog.

It caused me a moment to pause and think about this today as I saw another self-proclaimed guru talk about how great this person was at providing social media services. On the website this person offers a number of social media services priced at a rock bottom price.

I thought I’d take the opportunity to demystify how much work it takes to properly provide the minimum of management for a business social media presence. I'll just discuss the Twitter service. This particular consultant offers three distinct components for Twitter for one low monthly price. I’ll share the price at the end and you can tell me if you think it’s worth the risk.

Twitter Follower Building

There are a few automation tools out there. In fact, most of them are mediocre at best. However, even with the automation tools available, building an appropriate follower base that is not full of spammers takes daily effort. To effectively grow a Twitter follower base, prune it to keep it healthy and make sure your account isn't following spammers, we usually plan about five to ten minutes per business day. Depending on the client and the needs, we might spend a lot more time managing the follower building time.

For the purposes of this post, let’s call it an average of 7 minutes per day for 20 days per month for a total of 140 minutes or 2 hours 20 minutes.

Tweet Writing

This particular consultant promises to write 10 to 15 tweets per day. I assume it’s per business day. At an average of 12 tweets per day for 20 days, we are looking at 240 tweets per month.

Let’s talk about what this should take to do.

When you are tweeting for yourself, a tweet might only take 20-30 seconds. You tweet while you are waiting at a stop light. You tweet while you are in line at In-n-Out waiting for your Double-Double Animal Style. You tweet when something comes to your mind.

When tweeting for someone else, this is not how it works.

When tweeting for someone else, you can never be as passionate and engaged unless this other person is your only client. For example, if you are working full-time for someone, you can get truly engaged. When you are working very part-time, you can only devote a tiny amount of mindshare.

When tweeting right, you need to write original content, you need to post links to relevant articles that you’ve read and apply to your audience. You need to take the time to write content that is meaningful. You need to write content that is timely.

In fact, this particular consultant even says the strategy includes using hashtags. That’s a funny thing to include in the contract. Hashtags simply mean that you are tweeting based on relevancy to what other people are tweeting. That means more engagement. It should be a standard part of any person or business tweeting.

There are ways to become a little more efficient with your time. Some tweets are going to take less time because you’ll say things like, “Have a great weekend!” Sometimes they’ll be a link to a post somewhere.

For our clients, we plan at least about 5 minutes per tweet between the research overhead, time to get in a mode of understanding the needs of that client and the current topics to consider. But, let’s say it only takes two minutes per tweet.

At two minutes per tweet and 240 tweets per month, we are looking at 480 minutes or 8 hours per month. (Never mind that this number of tweets is probably way too many tweets for one month).

Audience Engagement

This service, we call inbox management, includes creating connections with your audience. It includes identifying followers who have written something compelling and communicating with them through retweets and messages. It includes forwarding leads to sales and problems or concerns to the appropriate department. Depending on the size of your business, this can take hours per month (or even a full time person or team of people).

I’m not sure how much this consultant has included in this service so I’ll suggest that this isn’t really included even though the product description says it does. It just takes too much time and I can't imagine this consultant is actually doing the work required.

The Price Comparison

So, from our example above, we are looking at a minimum of 10 hours per month to manage what this 'guru' is suggesting.

The problem is that this consultant wants to only charge $97 per month to do it.

Now, $9.70 per hour sounds like a pretty good deal, but what level of professionalism are you really getting? What level of marketing or business expertise are you going to see from this outside consultant?

Are you going to get someone that really understands your business and will take the time necessary to communicate your brand properly? Are you going to get someone that learns and understands your voice and engage your audience properly?

Or, are you going to get someone that is going to find any shortcut possible so that he or she can figure out how to recoup the lost dollars because the contract rate is so low.

If you want a real expert, make sure you pay appropriately for it or you'll find that you won't see the success you expect.