It sometimes feels like social media is powered by lists. You know the sort of thing:
…and so on. (By the way, the only relevance these three have to this post is that they were the first three I came across in my Twitter feed whilst writing. That’s three out of twenty one. You get my point?)
I have no problems with lists per se but generally don’t look at them. However, I did come across this one the other day:
OK, the combination of ‘sales’ and ‘Twitter’ is always going to make me look but I wasn’t expecting what I found.
First off, I don’t think this is a monthly list because April’s list is “Top 100 Green Experts to Follow on Twitter” and February’s list was “Top 70 Business Coaches to Follow on Twitter”. I’m willing to be corrected if you know better.
How many ‘experts’?
Secondly, the churn rate was astonishing. Only 19 of the ‘sales experts’ had appeared in the previous list and of those only 1 had retained his position, 3 were climbers and the remaining 15 had fallen in the rankings. The smallest fall was 1 place, the largest was a huge 75 places.
I know that fashions come and go but in sales the wheels tend to grind exceeding slow. If you’re an expert this month, you’ll be an expert next month, in 3 months and in 12 months time. Or not, if this list is to be believed.
So then I start looking down the list and there are some names I recognise and follow but mostly there are names I don’t recognise. OK, maybe I need to up my Twitter game.
That is, until I got to Number 80 on the list, @SalesjobsUSA. I was intrigued to understand how a jobs feed (or so it appeared) could be an expert. So I took a look.
Scrolling down as far as mid-March the majority of tweets are quotes, there’s a bunch of health-related tweets like this “Sales 101-Looking good, feeling confident? Got a cold sore? Some tips…” followed by a shortened link that take you to an alternative health website. Also in the mix we have some ‘inspirational story’ tweets with links to a quotes website.
In what way ‘expert’?
So it’s not a job site and it’s not even a sales site. That’s actually not a problem. I don’t really care how someone wants to use Twitter – that’s their business.
No, my issue is now with the list of ‘Top 100 Sales Experts…’ Am I actually just looking at an automated list of 100 Twitter sites with the words ‘sales’ and ‘expert’ in the bios? I think I probably am. So what?
The bottom line is that the list has no credibility and the author of the list has no credibility. Regardless of the quality of his work, I won’t be looking at it in the future.
In the wonderful world of social media, that’s how easy it is to affect the world’s perception of what you do.
Or am I being too harsh (again)?
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