The most frequent objection I hear to social media is “but will it get any business for us?”
Businesses understand that social media can help improve their reputation but in these tough economic times, it’s just not enough. If they’re paying you to manage your social media for them, they want to see a return on their investment.
One of the major mistakes that marketers make is to treat social media as a purely online exercise when in fact it frequently crosses over from online to offline social networking and back again. And it’s here that the sales opportunities arise. Here are just a few examples:
- There are LinkedIn groups that serve networking organisations and chambers of commerce. These are virtual meeting places where members can chat to each other, but these groups will also have offline networking events where you can meet and talk to members in person.
- Forums are private social networks where like minded people will talk in detail about problems they are experiencing. For example, if you’re a personal injury lawyer, there are forums for injury victims where you can chat online to sufferers and answer legal questions about their case. At an appropriate stage of the conversation, you can ask people to contact you by email / phone so they can give you more details about their case.
- On Twitter, you can follow and talk to potential clients. For example, you may be a serviced office outside London that has monitored the conversations of business people looking to temporarily relocate their staff during the London 2012 Olympics. You can intervene in the conversation and suggest they visit your offices for a tour.
- And it works the other way too. If you’ve recently met a potential client, you can connect with them on LinkedIn or Twitter. This will give you the opportunity to continue building your relationship with them by informing and educating them about your products and services through regular updates and online discussions.
Social media is not an end in itself, but a means of connecting with people that you would not have otherwise met. Once you are sufficiently familiar with them on social media, you should waste no time in getting to know them in person. And if you’ve met in person, you should waste no time in utilising social media as a way to stay in touch.
