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Social Media Networking for Business - are you covering all the Angles?

Guest post by: Allan Kent

Article Overview: Most business owners and marketing managers can see the value of social media in promoting a brand and engaging with customers and future customers. However, there's another side to social media that seems to get neglected that is equally as powerful as a sales tool, perhaps even more so than the traditioanl usage. This article explains more.

Social Media Networking for Business - are you covering all the Angles?

So, Social Media Networking - Are you really covering all the angles and using it to its potential?

There is no definitive ‘right' way of doing social media networking as each business is so different, and as it's such an evolving space, but it's true that most people seem to only see its value from one side and are missing some real tricks.

Social media networking started out as what it says, personal socialising online. Making friends, re-connecting with old ones or even dating were its primary functions. Facebook, Friends Reunited, Myspace even YouTube etc. were never designed as marketing tools. However, as their usage has so dramatically increased, and as their reach is so wide, savvy marketers have naturally seen their value and now almost everyone keen on online marketing sees a viable place for them in promoting their businesses online.

The most obvious use of social media networking is to create brand awareness and use it as a means of drawing people to you, ultimately to bring them on board as customers.

However, what is being missed I believe is social media's use as an active sales tool for more proactive out bound selling.

Taking a step back to help explain; a major part of my role at Labyrinth is to source new business. No one really likes to do ‘cold' calling and typically the results are generally on the poor side of low. Where possible we try to warm leads through physical networking, making sure we're at the places our prospects are.

As head of Business Development I tend to make calls to the larger prospects - the ones whose business we really want to win. Recently I've modified my approach to this and the results have been astounding! As always, before making that first call I naturally do a little research. Looking at their website is a given, but now I do a little extra research - on Facebook and in Linked In!

A prospect with a Facebook page gives me an idea of their thinking on the importance of their online presence - something I need to know as I'm in the business of selling websites and online marketing services. The number or Fans/Likes, and the regularity of their postings tells me how pro-active they are with it. Also, what they choose to talk about gives me an idea of their culture and the approach I need to take to get in the door with them. Importantly it sometimes reveals issues or problems that our services can help with.

Whatever your line of business, there will almost certainly be times that the information you get from their social networking posts will provide you with snippets of invaluable information - a need or an issue they need addressing and for which you have just the answer.

In most cases I will ‘Like' their site and I make sure I post a few sensible or insightful comments so that whoever is managing their pages gets some awareness of who we are.

In the instances when I've done this before my sales call, the comment I quite often get is " Hey, I've seen you on our Facebook pages" - a great conversation and door opener.

For us, dealing with corporates, our sales cycle tends to be fairly lengthy, often 12 months or more. After my sales pitch I obviously I follow up with regular telephone calls and emails, but I now also keep an eye on their Facebook postings too, commenting where I can on things that interest them ( sensible comments of course) and sharing links to information that reinforces my sales pitch etc. This is a very ‘softly softly' approach but is great for ensuring we stay in their consciousness and improving our chances over the length of the sales cycle when we might otherwise have faded into the background.

Linked-In is also a great business resource. Not only have people come to me, and to our site from my activity on there (initiating discussions in the targeted groups I've joined, and posting valuable thoughts on other discussions), I have also used it to identify my target prospects for out bound sales campaigns.

LinkedIn has a great internal search capability. If you want to target Chief Financial Officers, you can easily do this. The search results will present those with the closest connections to you - perhaps some you already know but hadn't thought of as being within your target audience. Some will show as being directly connected to others you do know first hand. What I do here is contact the person I know and ask for an introduction. This makes my first call not so much cold as at least warm!

For all first meetings, whether from an inbound lead or from any other means, I tend to see if they have a LinkedIn profile. This gives a great heads-up on their personality type, their interests, and who they interact with. If I know that they know one of my contacts I'll try and bring that up in the conversation. Obviously you need to do all this subtly, you don't want to come across like a stalker, but generally knowledge is useful. And remember, this is all knowledge they've made available in the public domain.

So, these are some of the things the team and I do here, though I'm confident that there are some excellent ideas that we're missing. Care to share yours?

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Article Tags: business owners, Facebook, Linked in, LinkedIn, marketing managers, sales managers, sales tool, social media, social media networking



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