I was recently followed on Twitter by an acccount claiming to be a social media agency, whose tweetstream consists entirely of brags and ads.

You know the sort of thing: XYZ client tells us how great we are, outsource your social media to us, we're the greatest, etc. Some of the ads were promos for their clients. Many tweets were repeated every week or so, with the wording just slightly changed (sometimes). I went back six months and the pattern was the same. Nothing of information, nothing helpful, no RTs, no real conversation.

This is a good example of poor practice. If you're not sure why, feel free to check out my post at Social Media Today on "10 ways I plan to become a better Twitter user".

Why should this bother me? Because, although there are plenty of Twitter accounts of this kind, they are not generally run by people who claim to know about social media. And who presumably (because they advocate 'outsourcing') run their clients' accounts in the same way.

It's a bit like the early days of search engine optimisation (SEO) when companies sprang up, making all kinds of promises to small businesses. This usually involved the SEO company creating and hosting hundreds of doorway pages on the client's behalf (amongst other things). Did they deliver great results? Short term, sometimes yes. Long term, the company was liable to be penalised by Google for using black hat techniques, and when the client left them the SEO firm would simply pull the pages - end of rankings.

Don't get me wrong, SEO can be outsourced very effectively - it's increasingly complex and specialised. but social media is different altogether. Companies must do it themselves - perhaps in conjunction with consultancy & training, and/or account co-management. The ideal to aim for is for 'social' to permeate every pore of the client company. But until this is better understood there will always be those with a little bit of knowledge prepared to jump on the social media expert bandwagon and try making money from it.

Social media activities need to be sustainable in-house and owned by an organisation's people. It is not an add-on and it is not 'just another marketing channel'. Hand it over to a third party at your peril.

Robin Houghton is a marketer & writer based in Lewes, East Sussex. Under the business name Eggbox Marketing I advise, consult & speak on social media & online marketing, which I've been doing for 12 years.

www.eggblogg.co.uk