Partner Article

Can social media ever be a successful sales tool?

We often see it written on discussion forums for fledgling businesses online, “How can I monetize my social media, and turn my followers into sales?”

It’s a perfectly valid question, but it’s not really the most apt question for social media. Setting out with the aim of converting followers to customers in order to “monetize” them, often provides only disappointing results.

Social media doesn’t tend to work like that. Take your own Facebook or Twitter: do you ever log in and think, “Gosh, I really fancy being sold to today.”? Probably not. And you’re not alone.

For most people, social media is a distraction from the work and pressure of everyday life. They want to read about celebrity gossip, interact with friends and, generally, not feel under any kind of pressure. Social media has replaced the act of going home, putting your feet up in the evening, and reading the paper with a glass of wine.

With that in mind, it seems obvious that you cannot expect to sell your product or service to someone in the same manner you would had they just walked into your shop. Unlike when they enter your store, they are neither expecting nor wanting to buy anything. As a result, the tactics used to sell on social media are strikingly different from traditional sales, and it’s a distinction that many experienced sales either don’t trust, or find difficult to grasp.

In practice, it’s actually astoundingly simple. The key is to craft content that is natural and organic, not using sales rhetoric and not in-your-face. Would you be more likely to listen to your friend on Facebook if he said, “Cannot believe how good the texting is on my new phone. Loving the HTC One!” or if he said, “The HTC One! Available today from your local store for only $499 SIM-FREE!! Bargain! Buy today!”?

Advertisers continue to strive for innovative ways to grab consumers attentions, because we learn to filter out ads over time if they remain unchanged. Your sales-heavy content may get plenty of views, but how many of them actually read it? As we learned from this week’s Channel 4 Dispatches about #FakeFans, there’s certainly a market for fake and worthless followers, just to get their account follower numbers up high.

This new method of indirect sales, infiltrating the lexicon with unobtrusive information about the virtues of your product, can be frustrating since it deviates from traditional convention. It can be very hard to track, for one thing. If someone comes into your shop, and buys a pair of shoes from your salesman Phil after Phil recommended your best brand, you can be fairly sure Phil’s done a good job. Social media is so much more complex, and involves a variety of social interactions, visual impression response, memory recall and content with viral potential. The answer to how to sell on social media is to appear simple, no matter how much research and calculation has gone into the campaign.

Getting it right isn’t easy; it’s about fine margins of passivity and activity, and maintaining that balance, but one thing is certain: traditional sales tactics are becoming less and less effective online. Dynamic, responsive, subtle and innovative are the buzzwords of 2013, and will continue to be so for the next few years at least!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Digitia .