Step two – Plan Plan and Plan
Plan how you will approach your Social Media campaigns and activities. People do not like aggressive sales methods and when on the web such tactics are at best just ignored or at worst you can be removed or deleted from peoples feeds wasting the hard work you put in to get there in the first place. Place your efforts in opening and contributing to conversations, engaging in discussions, building relationships or put simple earning trust, becoming an expert in your field. Once trust is gained it becomes easier to introduce your products and services.
Consider the heating engineer down in the pub, at his or her local sports club or at the church gathering it does not really matter where but it is out of the work environment. Is he going to tell his friends and /or mates that he wants to come and service their boilers? I doubt it as he will be given short shift but what if he tells a story about how he helped a family who’s boiler packed in because it had not been serviced. The next move is someone says, hey, my boiler has not been serviced for ages, or I know a family down the road who have had bother with their boiler, I will give them your card.
Remember gain trust, tell success stories, and do not hard sell, the business can then come to you.
Step 3 – Giver’s Gain
To have people Follow or Like You on Twitter and Facebook you need offer them a reason to do so, or give them something in the form of an irresistible offer, a free e-book, discount, limited offer or membership offering something. Your prospective customers need to know what is in it for me them. Think about how you respond to web sites asking you to sign up, what would make you go that extra step and register, signup, give your email address over etc. Look at what your competition are doing, not just in your own country but worldwide, you might just find that great idea already being used down under.
Make the right offer, have the right product, innovative, well priced, unique even and the whole social media world will do what it does best FOR YOU. Your friends will tell their family and friends and they will tell theirs, people will talk about it on social media sites and even write about it in blogs. But remember, be warned, if the product, or your service, does not match up to the claims they will also tell everyone who will tell everyone…. so all your efforts will be lost and your next product will already have a damaged reputation.