Seriously! Everyone is a social media expert. There are thousands walking around to take your money to teach you about social media. How can you tell the real ones from the opportunistic ones?

Google them. If not much comes up, then they are all talk no action.

Review their Twitter profile. If it is updated multiple times every day with @ replies and RT retweets as well as his/her own tweets – daily – then they are just giving it lip service.

Read their blog. Is it current? Is it updated multiple times per week? What do they talk about?

It’s not about the number of followers. It’s about the number of people listening. It’s about the number of people you are engaging that makes social media so powerful.

Gary Vee says it is the platforms to utilize for personal branding. He’s right. Marketing is marketing. The key today is to tell a compelling story that will interest your audience. Publishing that story is the magic pixie dust of social media because you can publish it for free on many platforms.

So before you plunk down money on social media training, make certain that the person in the front of the room is actually utilizing social media – and utilizing the way that you might want to.

In addition, if they talk about the number of followers, walk away. It’s about the message (the story, the content). It’s about having a conversation with the marketplace.

To do that, the expert should help you with your strategy, your goal for each platform you will be active on, and identify who you are targeting and where they hang out. (No sense in being on MySpace if you aren’t targeting teens and musicians).

Don’t listen to just anybody. You didn’t for your offline marketing, did you?