I use FB, Twitter & LinkedIn on a daily basis for business as well as personal social presence, and have connected with hundreds of my potential clients on these platforms. Certainly social media has the ability to connect businesses with millions of potential customers globally. It’s a powerful communication tool, but as we all learned from the comic books of our youth—with great power comes great responsibility. Use these social websites the right way and you can boost both your social presence and your sales. Use it the wrong way and the backlash could be tremendous.
After helping more than ten businesses succeed in their social presence I’ve penned down some essential points below to help your brand’s presence & social selling capacity.
You Need To Stand Out
The only way you can leverage the benefits of social media is by increasing your social presence. Before you start selling through social media channels, you need to stand out of the crowd of pages that are already there.
With all the styled and themes that these social media websites have, it’s easy to make your brand pages presentable. Be it Facebook or Twitter, you get to set your custom cover pictures and profile pictures for your brand pages. In FB you also need to have all the info that your potential customer needs to know.
But only presenting won’t help if you’re trying to be a social seller. You need to interact with your followers, post frequently and increase the number of followers.
Be The Expert
As with any type of sales, if you want your customer’s trust, you’d better know what you’re talking about —social media is no exception. You’ve got to take every chance you get to let your social network know that you’re an expert in your niche.
Take some time to search for other “experts” or organizations similar to yours. How are they beginning new conversations? Are they using specific hash tags? What kind of information are they communicating? Study these competitors and use what they do successfully as a template. Just be sure that you’re keeping your content up to date. No one is going to think of you as a guru if you’re just recycling your competitor’s information.
Study Your Followers
As you start using Facebook or Twitter more and more, you’ll probably start to see some patterns in your followers’ activities. Most people have a daily schedule they stick to and their Twitter time will probably follow a schedule as well, same goes for your Facebook followers. Study the patterns by looking at when your posts are most often read, or when your posts are most often retweeted, shared during the day.
Take that information and use it to your advantage. Schedule your tweets so they will be on the top of your followers’ feeds when they’re checking them.
Monitor Keywords
Keywords are important when it comes to finding leads on social media. Finding the right keywords can help you stay up to date with trending topics and keep you relevant to your followers.
There are a ton of applications available online that can help you monitor and track your relevant keywords, HootSuite and Tweetdeck to name a few.
Advertise
If you have the budget then you can opt for to Advertise on social media websites. We have tried Facebook ads several times for TSJ’s page and have seen some good numbers in case of likes and reach. Also you can try Twitter’s promoted tweets to gain more sales. This might not be feasible for every business that is getting started, but if you have the money then this can help in your social sales.
