Introduction – The Basics To Knowing How To Sell On Social Media
OK, before looking at “how to sell on Social Media”, let’s get a few things straight first off.
People don’t go to social media to be sold to. But that doesn’t mean they don’t BUY from social media.
Every business who ‘does’ social media expects to get something from it. Otherwise why do it right?
Many businesses have unrealistic expectations in relation to the time and / or money they may have to spend and the return they will get.
So, let me make this clear. You are either going to have to put money into this or you are going to have to put time into it. My suggestion is that if you have spare time and not much money – learn how to do it. But at the point at which you don’t have 2 hours a day to put into your social media, get someone else to do it.
We’ll talk about WHAT that should be in a minute but first another question.
Does Social Media Work for Business?
Of course it does. Sorry, that question is about as sensible as asking ‘Do websites work for business?’.
However, for a website to work, you must know the purpose of the website and design it around that purpose. You then need to spend money (or time) maintaining it, updating it and making sure it is fit for purpose.
Well it’s exactly the same for being able to sell on social media.
You must know what and who it is for, and you have to design your strategy around that and in line with the business strategy. Then you have to spend time or money or both updating it on a daily basis, and keeping up with all the many – sometimes daily – changes that happen.
You must also know where you are in your business life cycle.
Start-up Businesses
If you are a start up business, then your website’s job and that of your social media is to get you out there – educate your market that you exist – and give lots of content which positions you as an expert and someone who can help your target customer.
Established Businesses
If you already have a big and engaged following – then you still want to give content to your ideal customers, but you can also offer them more stuff – free and paid – than you can as a newbie. As a newbie you have to prove that your stuff is worth having.
The main problem you have is that there is a lot of noise. No-one knows you. And it isn’t that they don’t have the £99 to pay for your online training or workshop – it is that they don’t have the TIME to waste on something which could be a waste of time.
So – you need to prove your FREE content is valuable before you even try to sell your paid content/products or services.
So Just How Do You Sell On Social Media Then?
Ultimately – how you sell on social media is by not selling. You sell by understanding your customer, giving them information which is valuable to them, engaging with them, building a relationship with them and then offering them solutions that meet their needs. Hell, if you get really good at this – you can just have the stuff available and people will come to you. But you still have to let them know about it – in a helpful, rather than ‘salesy’ way.
Selling to people before they know you, is like trying to sleep with someone on a first date. Sometimes it will work, but it probably won’t be long lasting and regular. And with most businesses the repeat business is where the money is. The loyal customer who comes back and recommends you to others is not the one who feels sold to. They are the ones who feel loved, appreciated and taken care of.
And that takes time. Like any relationship.
Can You Shortcut the Sales Cycle?
Yes of course. But you can’t get rid of it entirely.
Ways to shortcut the sales cycle:-
Pay for celebrity endorsement
Spend a ton of cash on ads
Do work for free in exchange for rocking testimonials
Joint Venture with a firm that already has a list of your potential clients
Buy a (quality) list
Know how to get media coverage
Try to create viral campaigns or pay someone to create them
Pay a great social media company to spend several hours a day which you don’t have to supercharge your social media
Hire a full time social media manager (expensive) – only do this IF you know a shedload about social media and can recognise a superstar when you see one – and be prepared to pay a premium. Most people are great at one or two channels but not expert at all of them – and the rare fish who are can charge what they like!
Unless you have an unlimited budget – please see social media as something you have to do from now on (or outsource). It’s not just for now or a couple of months – it is forever. It’s a bit like dieting – they fail because you stop following the diet. The only way to lose weight forever is to eat differently forever.
Likewise, the only way to make social work is to do it forever. You have to be consistent, you have to spend time on it, you have to keep up to date with the many changes, and the many tips and strategies, you have to constantly TEST.
Why You Need to Sell on Social Media
Social Media is no longer a luxury or something you can do without. You will get left behind if you are not in it now. Don’t you wish you had started building your tribe in 2004 when Facebook started? Well, the second best time is right now.
And the good news is – that it can be just like your website. It is NOT something that you HAVE to do yourself. You can if you want to of course, but I would hazard a guess that your hourly charge out rate – your TIME – is worth far more per hour than you could pay a great social media company to do it for you. So why waste your precious time?
The best way to sell through social media is to have a massive presence, where you need to be, created by someone who knows what they are doing, make you look good and build you a tribe of loyal potential customers. Then YOU just need to create something amazing to offer to them.
How often do you use Facebook Live in your social media marketing strategy? If you answered, “not a lot”, then you could be missing a trick!
Facebook live is a great way to get a large exposure and directly connect with your audience. Here are some creative ways you can use Facebook Live:
Take your audiences places they can’t go
News outlets report on events that most people don’t get to attend in real life so we can get a snippet of it. Facebook Live takes this to another level by allowing you to virtually be there in real time!
But how can you leverage this for your business? You can go live at your own industry event or a conference your customers/audience would be interested in. Make sure you promote your broadcast early and often to ensure people know that you will be going live and when.
It doesn’t just have to be a small snippet either: Facebook recommends longer broadcasts because they give users more chances to discover your content. You can broadcast for as long as four hours.
It’s a good idea to encourage questions in the comments and answer those questions in a Q&A session.
Team up with an influencer in your field
Co-marketing is one of a marketer’s strongest tools. By working together with another company or influencer, you can increase your exposure to potential customers.
But how do you go about doing this with Facebook Live? By identifying a key thought leader in the same or similar area as your business and featuring him or her in a Facebook Live broadcast. You want to make sure this person is good in front camera and will be entertaining for your audience. Identify a topic you want this person to speak about or demonstrate.
Ideally, the outcome of this will be mutually beneficial for both parties.
Host interviews
Interview your company’s employees, clients, or important people in your niche. Brands are all about the people that are a part of it, so let these people speak and your audience will listen! It’s a great opportunity for people to really get a feel of what your business is actually like and what its vision is on a more personal level.
Conclusion
Even though Facebook Live is now two years old (launched in 2015), people (and marketers) are still unsure how best to use it to their advantage. Hopefully, these tips will be able to help you leverage this important feature in your marketing. For more helpful tips on Social Media Marketing, follow us on Twitter @StrategySM
When the turkey is all eaten and the presents all opened – it is time to relax, chill out a bit and maybe think about what this year has meant for you. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about where you want your business to be by next Christmas. And that involves a bit of social media planning.
So in the true spirit of Christmas songs and festivities here are our 12 days of Christmas Social Media Sorcery (or is it Saucery?) –
On the First Day of Christmas my true love said to me – Tweet Daily.
I know it’s not the most interesting thing you could do right now – I’m sure you would rather be watching the Queens speech – however consistency is the first step to having a very merry Christmas next year. Get into the habit of tweeting daily. If people are used to seeing you – well that is the first step to get someone to know, like and trust you. All things you MUST have before anyone will even think about doing business with you.
On the Second Day of Christmas my true love said to me – Share useful content.
This means give your followers stuff they are interested in, like and will find useful That does NOT mean selling your services at every opportunity. Sure you might want to drop in the odd tweet about a workshop you are holding, a webinar you are running or a special offer on your book (what do you mean you haven’t written a book yet?). Give first. Plenty of useful content. Otherwise you will be seen like one of those annoying people at networking events who go around gathering as many business cards as possible so they can bombard those people with sales messages. DON’T DO IT.
On the Third Day of Christmas my true love said to me – Set a Social Media Goal for 2016
People with written goals tend to achieve them. As long as it is realistic, knowing what you want to achieve will keep you on track and relevant. So – do you want to engage with existing customers? Test out a new product? Get people into your funnel? Having a goal helps you curate the right content for your target audience. If you don’t know what you are trying to achieve then you need to go back to setting a Strategy. If you need any help with that let us know!
On the Fourth Day of Christmas my true love said to me – Engage.
Yes I know it’s Christmas and you have turkey sandwiches and left over buffet to eat and tonnes of port to drink – but remember to spend 10 minutes a day engaging. Look for @mentions and retweets and direct messages and respond. If you don’t, do not be surprised if these people don’t bother engaging with you in the future. It’s like ignoring someone who says “hi” to you in the corridor. It is just rude, and they won’t bother next time.
On the Fifth Day of Christmas my true love said to me – Don’t Hard Sell On Social Media.
And especially not on Facebook. People don’t go onto Facebook to buy stuff, they go on to be informed, entertained and to feel part of something. So give them information, make them laugh, make them think, ask questions, post cute cat photo’s – whatever – but do NOT hard sell.
On the Sixth Day of Christmas my true love said to me – Be Visual.
Post photos and videos. This type of content gets far more engagement of all varieties. People are getting less inclined to read – so save your long copy for your blog posts, and make the posts on FB short, snappy and backed up with photo’s, pictures, videos to have maximum effect.
On the Seventh Day of Christmas my true love said to me – Promote Your Website
One of the big pluses in social media is that you can direct traffic through to your website and also, the more likes and shares you get the higher you will rank on Google. So never underestimate the power of social media for helping you get found on the internet.
On the Eighth Day of Christmas my true said to me – to #Hashtag or not to #Hashtag.
Most people know what a hashtag is, and most don’t know how to use them properly. Broad generalisation we know – but true! Consider the medium first and how to use the # properly for that social media.
On the Ninth Day of Christmas my true love said to me – Schedule a Christmas and New Years Message.
On the basis that in social media you should be building a tribe of people who love you, why would you NOT want to say Happy Christmas and Happy New Year to them? Scheduling a tweet or a post is also easier than trying to do it at the time (networks are busy – you might have had a cheeky glass of champagne to two). And it’s just nice isn’t it, to get a nice message from people you follow.
On the Tenth Day of Christmas my true love said to me – Re-Cycle Great Content.
You spend hours writing an article or finding interesting articles to share, then you tweet about it once. That’s crazy.
There is nothing wrong with sharing the same content more than once – especially on Twitter – because the news feed moves so quickly. But keep in mind that this strategy works best with “evergreen” content. What I mean by that is – don’t post stuff about Christmas in March, only repost articles, blogs or white papers that will be useful over and over again for anyone who finds it.
Your reused content might not be as popular the second, third, or fourth time you share it – or it might do better!. Over time these can add to a substantial amount of new leads, conversions and potentially paying customers
On the Eleventh Day of Christmas my true love said to me – Use links with visual content
As per our earlier tips about being visual (because that creates more engagement, more likes and more shares), enhance that further by having great links driving traffic back to your website or landing page. Social media is the start of the funnel – as soon as possible – you want to get people who care about your content into your tribe and onto your email list so you can.
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas my true love said to me – Create a 12 month Plan.
This is the ideal time to set up a plan for 2016, using all current avenues and your knowledge of what is working for you etc and incorporating your own priorities for short, medium and long term. For a free, no obligation social media check – book your appointment here.
The pace of change in all areas of technology and business is happening at an outstanding rate. And that includes social and digital media. The importance of social media today by no means can be disputed. But, that importance is no longer simply because it is new. Rather it is because social media offers something truly useful to the world and especially businesses, so it’s therefore a good idea to keep up with it all.
So here are 3 predictions about the future of social media (remember that I’m not psychic and this all purely speculative):
Greater focus on profile/personality
The No. 1 deterrent for social media users when it comes to deciding if they want to connect with someone is a lack of profile completeness. It’s a subconscious association that if somebody’s profile is blank and boring then they are too. Whilst there is an option to include information about yourself and a short bio – what you really need to do is make your profile really personal… maybe add songs and playlists and your own designs?
Social media will be automated…
Organic social media will move to automation in the next couple of years, as consumers continue to express exasperation with cluttered messages, interruption and irrelevance. When you think about automation and what it can do it, and already does – it has the ability to let publishers de-clutter sites and get advertising more relevant and be native in a way consumers will accept.
Wearable Social Media
Wearable technology is starting to emerge as the next inevitable game-changer in the tech world, with devices like the apple watch and Google glass which you can read about here. The typical smart watch, as it stands right now, doesn’t offer much more than a smartphone–it’s just attached to your wrist and slightly smaller. But the ways we use a smart watch (or other wearable device) will gradually begin to evolve to better suit the device, and those changes will have an impact on the way we use social media and how businesses use it to interact with their consumers.
I think this will be a very interesting advancement in the world of social media and I’m keen to watch how companies like apple will integrate it into wearable technology. Pun intended!
You can create a buzz – Get the word out about your products and services in a way that promotes online conversation and increases engagement.
Build relationships and become more personal – (expanding on the first point) Use a variety of social media, and you’ll build relationships with customers and potential customers. Trust comes through honesty and sincerity.
Branding – It is extremely important for a small business to create a recognizable identity for your product or service. This is the way the customer perceives you, and what better way to do this than the use of social media?
It opens up the line of communication between business owner and millions of potential customers – Millions of people who could possibly become customers? You could not have this easily in the offline world. Thank you social media!
Social networking with potential clients and customers from all over the globe – With social networking sites such as Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter (among many, many others) you can hold personal conversations with each of your customers. Tell them about new products, sales and coupons, suggestions and tips – the topics are endless!
Small businesses can compete with the large companies – In the past, this was very difficult with the advertising and marketing budgets of large companies. With the right type of viral social media, you could potentially get an immense amount of traffic which keeps coming for a long time.
Online reputation management – Social Media is a good way to keep an eye on what other people are saying about your name, company, or brand online – and if any problems or complaints arise, they can be dealt with.
Social media is much cheaper than traditional marketing and advertising – Social media marketing shouldn’t cost a small business nearly as much as traditional advertising. If you do it yourself it might not cost anything at all. It will however cost you time. This is why it is a good idea to hire someone to help with the social media marketing.
Find out exactly what your customers want – Social media is amazing in so many ways, as you can see from the last 8 reasons. But, maybe one of the most amazing things about it is that you don’t have to wonder what your customers want. You want to know what they want? Just ask them!
It provides another way for potential customers to find you – If you’re not high enough in the search engines for potential customers to find you, don’t worry they can still find you through social media. Even if you’re not on the front page of Google, it doesn’t mean you can’t receive traffic.
So there you have it. All small businesses should take advantage of the benefits social media can provide you with, it’ a no-brainer!
Follow our Twitter for more tips on Social Media @StrategySMedia
OK, so this is going to be (kind of) a rant about something that’s been bugging me lately. But one that will hopefully help you out in your social media endeavours. It’s about how to use hashtags properly.
I think it’s damn near impossible to go onto social media these days and not come across a hashtag. They have become such a prominent part of tech culture these days (even being added to the Oxford English Dictionary) that pretty much everybody uses them. Which is fine. But it seems like A LOT of people don’t understand how to properly use them, or what the function of them actually is. People use hashtags because… well… because everybody else does, without giving it proper thought. #StupidPeople
The hashtag is there to help you increase engagement with people with similar interests. It makes your, s and other people’s, content discoverable. It is basically a way of categoriszing content on social media.
You should choose your hashtags carefully. Be specific. Don’t go throwing them around willy-nilly or try to be clever with them. For example if you are tweeting about food, use #food or #health or #recipe. DO NOT use something like #omgsodelicious #youshouldalltrythis #iamsuchagoodcook. If people are interested in recipes for food they WILL search for #food and #recipe. So keep it simple and specific.
You should test a hashtag out before you use it. Simply search for it in the search bar and if it is widely used then great! If not, there probably isn’t much point in using it. Some people like to overuse hashtags which comes across as quite spammy and desperate. No post ever should have more hashtags than words.
That is a big no-no.
People seem to mainly do this on Instagram. It’s not uncommon to see people using up to 30 (30?!) most of which are unrelated and pointless. Spammy and desperate is not a good look. It also seems like people use the hashtags as a description of their picture and to be ironic and funny. #Butitsreallynotthatfunny … see. They aren’t there to make you look cool or funny to your followers, they’re there to help you.
Hashtags can be really useful on Social Media, allowing you to reach a wider audience and make a good impression. (Plus they really aren’t that hard of a concept to grasp!) So – I hope this helped!
Follow us on @StrategySMedia for more helpful tips on Social Media
How important is your online profile? It turns out: very.
Facebook
Just last weekend on a drunken endeavour, somebody took a picture of my group of friends in a club. We’re all generally quite unphotogenic anyway, but the one person that stood out was my friend who somehow managed to look like he was getting his ugly mug punched in the face by an invisible entity. He was cross-eyed and looked extremely pained, maybe even as if he was getting electrocuted. Everyone else found this hilarious of course, but not him. He literally snatched the phone with the picture on from my other friend’s hands and deleted it before it had chance to reach any social media platforms.
When asked about his over reaction, he did seem to have quite a valid reason, to be fair. He had recently started a new job at quite a respectable company and didn’t want to jeopardise his reputation there with a drunken picture on his Facebook profile. A year ago I would have laughed at him and told him not to be silly and that nobody cares about your Facebook and nobody’s bothered about a silly picture, but working for a recruitment company for the past 10 months has taught me that this is WRONG, and how you appear online is very important when it comes to getting hired and your reputation.
Companies use social media to do a background check on you before an interview. This makes sense, as you are far more likely to show your true colours on Facebook. Whereas on your CV or Linkedin you’re going to big yourself up as much as possible. Whilst doing some research into this I came across an article about how you should present your Facebook when looking for a job. It said you should show no links to your personal life, you shouldn’t have pictures of your children/family and your profile picture should be smart/casual. For Linkedin this is spot on, but the article was talking about Facebook for crying out loud. I thought it was a bit extreme. In my opinion as long as your profile picture isn’t of you surrounded by half naked strippers whilst you down a beer bong, you should be fine. Just be mindful of the content you are posting. Ask yourself, “If I was an employer, would this put me off employing someone?”
This applies to status updates as well. “ERRRRRR gonna get soooooo mortal later!!!!” = not appropriate.
Linkedin
Your Linkedin profile is also of vital importance when it comes to your online persona. (If you haven’t got Linkedin yet… what an earth are you playing at? Go sign up, right now.) I like to think of it as the Facebook of the business world… but without selfies and status updates about what you’re having for tea. Now obviously you’re not going to post inappropriate materiel on here (unless you’re very, very stupid and have no ambition to be successful) BUT, there are some very easy mistakes that people make without realising it or considering it a big deal. Mistakes that could potentially stop someone from hiring you, such as:
• Having incomplete information on your profile
• Having no profile picture .This just looks as if you can’t be bothered to make the profile presentable, and also – this is online NETWORKING people. You wouldn’t turn up to a networking event with a bag on your head. People want to see who they are dealing with.
• Having no contact information on there… what’s the point of even having the profile if people can’t contact you?
• Never posting a status or update… how does anybody know what you’re up to when you don’t let them know?
• Using the title of “job seeker” rather than putting your profile job title.
These are just small things but they really do affect how employers view you, so be wary of this.
Finally, we are living in a social media world. It is no longer the province of ‘the young’ – and what you put online can always be found. So – think about how you want to appear to the world, and proceed with caution!
A valuable life skill: making the best of a bad situation.
I am a Social Media apprentice. Being an apprentice involves completing an NVQ course for college (which equals two A levels, if you were wondering.) For most people this means going into college once a week or once every two weeks to complete work for said NVQ.
Although for me, this has not been the case. I’m not going to come right out and tell you which college I am doing this apprenticeship with (I’ll give you a clue, I live in Manchester) but I will say their service and organization is diabolically and mind-bendingly terrible. How is anybody supposed to complete a course that nobody has bothered to set up?!
You see, I started this apprenticeship in December and it took until mid August for anything productive to start happening (if you could even call what happened “productive”) I was given no work for months and every time they sent a “tutor” in it was always the same outcome: they would have no work to give me and it was basically a pointless and frustrating endeavour. And I’m pretty sure these people were an accurate manifestation of the college they were representing: confused, unorganized, senseless and totally making it up as they went along.
This was aggravating to say the least, but low and behold, somebody turned up one day with some actual work for me. They amazingly had a course set up… A real actual course, with an official name and official units and a mark scheme… the whole shebang! For the first time in my life I was actually happy and eager to receive work. (This is relevant to my life after all, unlike Pythagoras theory and Trigonometry.)
“Great!” I thought. “Now I can get on with all the work that I am 8 months behind on.”
Wrong.
It turns out I have to email them (many, many times, I may add) for them to send me my next unit of work. The last time I asked for work was over three weeks ago and I still haven’t received it. I now have a years worth of a college course to complete in a very short amount of time. This is a very bad situation indeed. But instead of complaining about it (yes I know I have complained a lot here, but I’m getting to the important bit, hang on) I decided to make the best with what I’ve got.
Since the nice woman from the college gave me the official name of the course and the units I am supposed to do, I decided to Google it. You can actually see the units and some of the work online but you cannot access the file to see what the content is. But, using my initiative I realised I could kind of teach my self the content. For example, one of the units it called “Use of digital and social media in business.” So for a short while I simply researched this subject. I’m not going to have learnt all the content I need for the course by doing this, but I now have a much better idea about it and will be able to do that unit relatively easily and quickly when they finally send it to me.
This has taught me to be more independent, that you can only rely on yourself, to take everything people say with a pinch of salt, and that *Insert college name here* are a pile of *cough*cough*
Recently I also very cleverly managed to somehow break our company’s website. (Sarcasm) I have no experience with web design and coding and HTML and all that jibber-jabber so I was confused as to what I had done… or if it was in fact even something I had done (I suspect it was.) As Shaggy said: “it wasn’t me.”
The website was down for days and this was bad for the business for obvious reasons but also bad for me as it meant there was a lot of work I couldn’t get on with. To compensate for this, I took it upon myself to learn the basics of web design. I wasn’t trying to fix the website myself as that was obviously way out of my skill level, but just trying to gain a basic understanding of how websites work so in the future I could avoid this sort of problem. It’s also just a valuable and desirable skill to have; it looks good on a CV and gave me something productive to do for a couple of hours each day. Again: making the best out of a bad situation!
Obviously this is only two instances. But from now on I (and hopefully you) will apply this way of thinking to all bad situations. Nothing is as bad as it seems, and you can always learn something from it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to email the college (for the 5th time this week!)
I wonder if you, like me, think it is fairly obvious why it is a bad idea to buy your Twitter followers. Unless I’m missing something, I do not see what there is to be gained from paying for followers. Let me elaborate on why it is a good idea that you don’t buy twitter followers.
The short version: it gets you nowhere.
Don’t be under the illusion that your business will appear more successful if you have thousands of followers. If they are real followers then yes – of course.
But if you have paid for them it actually has the opposite effect. It is quite obvious they have been bought as 98% of them are fake profiles that have been made for this purpose. They normally have strange looking names, no tweets, no followers and a picture of an egg as the profile picture. If somebody checks your followers (which there is a good chance they might do, to see if you have anybody worth following) it isn’t going to create the right impression for your business and you will lose your reputation.
Purchased fans will not increase your business in any way. Even if it does gain the attention of other people who become “real” followers it will not increase the page views or engagement. What’s more important: having 10,000 followers, or having 100 that you actually engage with? Quantity over quality.
Reviews are more important than followers – as follower count alone does not quantify how successful your business is.
You could also end up spamming your real followers which can be very annoying and in turn could end up with them unfollowing you. Twitter Follower services ask to access your Twitter account to send out multiple messages advertising their way of increasing people’s followers. You will end up gaining lots of eggheads (that’s what we call the fake profiles with the pictures of eggs by the way) and losing real followers.
You’re also scamming your own business. A good analogy of this logic is that it is like cheating on a test. You will get a good grade (or lots of followers) but you will have gained no new knowledge in the long run (no new business.)
If you’re not buying them for business purposes and are doing it to look like you’re really cool and really popular then you may want to revaluate your life and maybe get out more
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