4 Ways to Leverage Social Media to Sell Your Products

1. Match your social strategy to your customer

Is your customer a teenager? A single mum who is looking for a great cookie recipe? Maybe a thought leader.

Each of these descriptions matches with a particular social networking platform – LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter and can inform which may be the best for your business.

Start listening for problems you can solve, and share meaningful advice.

2. Create the right content 

A good social strategy requires content that’s original and engaging.  Depending on who your customer is, you’ll have to find a balance for frequency and formats.

Too little or too much can be damaging to the objective.  If you constantly comment, you run the risk of putting potential customers off.  Different social networks serve different functions.  A thoughtful tutorial may be the way to capture customers’ hearts on LinkedIn but posting a time-limited discount code may be the better call in the Twitter environment.

3. Build your network

You will need to take on the work of building your network.  Create daily, weekly and monthly goals so that you are committed to a schedule of engagement from the outset.

Search the relevant social sites to find people who are talking about your industry or using related keywords. Then, retweet them, and respond to questions they ask that you find to be intriguing. By contributing to your prospects’ conversations, you build them up and add value to their network.

4. Connect it back to your business

None of this really matters if there’s no bump in sales, and that comes from serving purposeful calls to action to potential customers.

Relationships are much more important than leads when you are selling via social. People share a lot of information, and if you take the time to listen to what they are saying, you will be in the best possible position to have meaningful conversations with the right people and offer “just the thing” they want or need at that moment.

Imagine that you have identified your customer, found where he or she spends time online socially, created meaningful content to increase awareness and engagement with those customers, and then served up a buyable experience at the very moment they discover a need for your product.

At that moment, you have at-once delighted your customer, increased sales, and proven the value of all of that hard work.