Why Social Media? Part 2

In Why Social Media? Part 1 we talked about the individuality of social media and today I’d like to explore how we can utilise our social media presence for sales.

As we talked about in Part 1, social media works because we bring our individual selves to the social media table. It’s here that we get to share our thoughts, plans, achievements and even our businesses.

As soon as we include business we have to tread carefully, just as we would when we’re sitting at a dinner party with friends. Just as we might figuratively roll our eyes at that friend who seems to monopolises the conversation with their new business we have to understand that the same applies within our social media circles.

We are generally more than happy to support our friends and this is obvious as we ‘like’ and ‘share’ each other’s stories through social media. When our friends have businesses we often recommend them to others and as a community we support worthy causes just as easily.

The level of relationship that we have with that friend at the dinner party dictates whether we are annoyed by them discussing the status of their passion or happy to hear how things are going and decide how we might support them or even buy from them.

Within our social media circles it works the same. We want to hear from our friends but less interested to be bombarded by businesses who only want to sell something! This notion of selling suddenly becomes relative.

If a friend sells gym bags and we buy one, do we feel as if they were ‘selling’ to us? Likely not but we might feel that way if that same friend sends us a generic email every day telling us that we should buy one.

Our presence on social media allows for countless opportunities to sell our products or services but the key point is that our aim should be to sharing (selling) ourselves.

Our business page or profile page, depending on which way we have decided to brand our product, must seek friends first.

Gather friends, invite interested people into your social media friendship circle, share about your life, your dreams, your writing, your books, your services, what causes you believe in and even what you 

stand for.

Casually interested people become interested, interested people become friends, friends support each other and that support turns into sales.

Kathy Smail, after her family roles, is a Communicator who loves the impact of words and is 
working on a novel, when she can drag herself away from reading. Her previous role as the Social Media Manager for a national retailer and various roles in Corporate Affairs, Marketing, Human Resources and Learning & Development has fed her passion for getting the message across. 


She can be found chatting:
Facebook: Kathy Smail Social Marketing Business
Twitter: @KathySmail
Instagram: kathysmail_social_marketing
The Web: www.kjs.com.au