5 Really Easy Ways to Increase Sales with Social Media

Using social media to engage with potential and current customers is all you hear about anymore.  Doing it properly is not that hard—really!  Just follow these five common-sense guidelines, and you can turn your social media networks into sales channels.

1. Treat everyone like an individual

Not everyone who follows you on Twitter or likes your page on Facebook is a guaranteed potential customer. Some of them might be ready to buy now, some might just be looking, some might admire your brand but can’t afford you, some might just view you as a source of industry information and want to “keep in touch” via social media.

If you end up treating everyone the same on social media, you are missing out on valuable branding, marketing, and sales opportunities.  Respond to each new follower as you would a person you just met at a party—with an open mind, ready to chat and see where the conversation goes.

2. Send personal messages

I hate getting automated tweets from the people who I just followed on Twitter.  I’m seeing less and less of this, but people are still doing it, which amazes me.  You don’t need to respond to every new follower!  If you do, make it personal.  Yes, this means you need to do it manually, but the social interaction is what social media was built around.

3. Engage instead of broadcast

When I get an alert that someone is following me on Twitter, I always check out their stream first to see if they are engaging with their followers. I look for retweets, mentions of other users, replies to other users, etc.  If a person or company is just using Twitter as a broadcasting tool—especially to promote themselves, their product or their service—then forget it.  I don’t follow them back!  If I wanted to have commercials forced on me, I would watch live television.

4. Nurture, don’t push, the sale

Back in my hometown of Poughkeepsie, New York, there was a fabulous, locally owned clothing boutique that was super popular when I was growing up.   My mom avoided it like the plague because the saleswomen would descend on you like vultures as soon as you walked in the door.  Even if you said you were just browsing, they would proceed to follow you around the store.  It was awful.

Don’t do the same thing to your social media followers.  Ask them what you can help them with, if you can answer any questions, if they found what they are looking for, and so on.  You don’t want to end up like the above-mentioned store: closed for business.

5. Give customers a reason to say “yes”

Obviously, you want to close the sale with potential customers, but you don’t want to be rude or pushy.  So, in addition to chatting with your followers, you should also give them lots and lots of reasons to buy from you.

The best way to do this is to provide your followers with educational content that clearly demonstrates the benefits of working with you.  Use social media to offer ebooks, white papers, case studies, testimonials, blog posts, articles and anything else that demonstrates how your superior product or service alleviates your customers’ pain points and delivers fabulous results.

Image Courtesy Flickr user epSos. de (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Monday, April 18th, 2011 at 9:00 am and is filed under Marketing, Small Business, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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