How many times have we heard of professionals or industry experts have the expectation they will be another golden child of social media just by having a blog? To much of their frustration and dismay, they aren’t handed the crown immediately by social media junkies. They start to ask, “What am I doing wrong? I don’t get this Twitter thing. I have knowledge but why aren’t they listening?”

Social media experts come back with instructional blog posts of “How to use Twitter”, “Personal Branding”, and “Get a LinkedIn account”. Everyone listens, and sign up for all these accounts. What do they do: nothing. They sit there staring at it like Twitter gives you measles.

Real World vs. Social Media World
For lack of better terminology, let’s call people in corporate America who gains revenue from everything besides social media, as the “Real World”. “Social Media World” is the professionals who are building businesses centered around either developing social media platforms, evangelizing it, or as a consultant. Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, Neenz, and Mark Zuckerb fall into this category.

What is extremely interesting is the number of real world professionals that try to cross over and expect immediate success. It just doesn’t happen. Regardless of how many bloggers and social media experts scream “Conversation” is the key, newbies still have the idea blogging once a week will equal instant success.

Pattern Of Social Media Immersion
There is a behavioral pattern of people entering social media. It typically starts with “I have a blog. Hear me roar!”. Great. Everyone has a blog including the neighbors’s pets. Realizing they are writing but no one is reading, they start searching out answers on how to have social media success.

They stumble upon Guy or Chris’s blog. Two of most successful social media professionals. They quickly get a Twitter account, LinkedIn, Facebook, and continue to blog. “I have a blog. I am Superhero!”. Again, they are lost because instead of looking at social media as a niche market, they just shove their blog posts at everyone.

Real world professionals don’t understand what it takes to have their success be transparent in the social media world. Why aren’t people engaging them? They get frustrated and pick one of the following paths:

1) Stick their nose up at social media and move back to real revenue making actions.
2) Hire a social media expert.
3) Keep blogging regardless if anyone is listening.

For the ones who have hired a social media expert, they probably are looking for someone to get their page views up. Beyond Hubspot’s king plan of meta tags, Google site maps, etc, there is the heart of what social media is about: conversation.

Professionals immersing themselves into the social media world, should treat it like it is a niche market. That’s all social media is. It is a niche market that maintains their own group values, decision making patterns, lifestyle similarities, morals, and behavioral patterns.

Traditional niche market groups require an outside agency to conduct research and population sampling to understand what drives the market. Social Media niche is putting it right out there in the open for you. You just have to listen and do it.

Niche Market Patterns
What is the key to breaking into the social media niche? Conversation. You can blog all day long, but if you are not joining the conversation on other blogs, Twitter, or LinkedIn, you will forever be invisible. Building a loyal customer, excuse me…readership base, is more than just keywords and meta tags. You have to go out like a street walker and talk to your customers…I mean readers. Engage them, entice them, yell profanities at them….Get their attention.

It takes a lot of work to stand on a street corner and start engaging. People like Chris Brogan make a CAREER of it. For the average real world professional, they struggle with work / social media balance. The social media niche really doesn’t care if you are sealing a multi-million dollar real estate deal today…they just care about the conversation on Twitter. Conversation is the key.

Get their attention, converse with them (OMG, actually reply on Twitter…REALLY!), and slowly start to build a presence. It is very hard for a real world professional to dominate the social media space since there are niche market experts who engage 24/7. Regardless, real world professionals have a wealth of information and knowledge to share. They can still have a substantial presence with some work and effort to join the conversation.

“Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands above it in the chemical tables,positively to that which stands below it” - Ralph Waldo Emerson