Often people look to emulate successful individuals in order to hopefully replicate some if not all of the same type of success. Taking inspiration from such individuals may be invaluable; however, emulating them or trying to replicate their success in social media based on their insight of this new medium is mostly a wasted effort.
Let’s stick to twitter as the main example. If someone’s success on twitter depends mostly on their success in another line of work, then there is very little to be learned from this experience for the average user. There is a particular ‘guru’ (who shall remain nameless), who exploits his past success to frame himself as a person with a deep understanding of how to successfully use twitter to positively impact your business. His success on twitter is largely based on notoriety gained from his past success in business, and has very little, if anything, to do with his nuanced understanding of twitter (and social media in general). Because he is well known, by default he has amassed close to 230,000 followers, most of whom know him from his previous work. He frequently speaks about how social media and specially twitter can help businesses, and all this does is provide content for the websites who choose to publish his articles or webcast his interviews, and also gets him more followers. But his advice about twitter is largely without value for the average user.
So, the moral of the story is that if you want to learn about social media, ask someone who built their success on social media not someone who figured out how to port it over from their previous success. Unless, of course, that is what you are looking to do.