You’re a savvy business professional building on years of sales success, and accustomed to driving results by pitching your business and its products to anyone who will listen. Special offers, deals, and end of season sales are the phrases you use in all your advertising as you try to recruit new customers. The question is, how do these business tactics translate to your ability to compete in the social media world and succeed in marketing yourself online?
Effectively Marketing Yourself Online
The truth is, they probably don’t. People on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are primarily looking for interesting information, and to engage in a conversation. Traditional sales messaging is typically more “in-your-face” than what typical social media users are looking for. If you are too aggressive or pushy in how you approach this new medium you may find that you are actually doing more harm than good. In order to be most effective, remember to promote your message as an electronic word-of-mouth recommendation, and NOT as a direct marketing pitch. Your connections are a lot more likely to check out what you are referring them to if they feel that you personally find it to be valid and worthwhile.
For these reasons, we encourage our social media clients to be careful to create status updates that are appropriate for the social space. As you consider words to introduce your update, avoid the following:
- Buy…
- Purchase…
- Join now…
- Promote…
Instead use words like:
- Excited to/for…
- Learning about…
- Reading about…
- Checking out…
- Looking forward to…
- Going to…
- Just read…
- Just watched…
- Just visited…
- Interesting article on…
If you are recommending a blog posting or article one of the most effective ways to promote it is to simply post the title of the publication, provided that it is descriptive enough to stand on its own.
If you are referencing a piece of content that has a particularly interesting tidbit of information associated with it, it can be very effective to pull out that data and use it as your status update.
In all cases, be sure to create a link to reference whatever it is that you are promoting.
Most importantly, never post something that doesn’t sound natural. Following the above tips will hopefully help you avoid that problem, but always verify that what you finally end up posting sounds as if it is something you would actually say in real life.
Engaging with those who follow you in this fashion will help you to achieve the results you are looking for. Don’t forget, if you are looking for ways to track the results of your social marketing efforts you can always contact us at 855.62.TOAST or via email.
