If you don't have a lot of friends outside of the web, you may find yourself really struggling to get known. The old rule about having to be social to be a salesman does not necessarily apply on the web because the actual formal meet-and-greet is a lot of times absent. Knowing this, it should be easy to build a social network, right? Wrong.
You can attempt to join every marketing professional group you may find, but you'll also find that every member will spam you with links to their business or how to build your network. A lot of this is nonsense and they know their rate of conversion to affiliates or customers is rather slim to none. The main problem is how vague and indirect the messages are. It's going to take time to know your audience, and it's always better to be a leader than a follower. Starting a group that targets a certain audience is really the most ideal situation. Don't just target other "online marketers" and try to build with competition. If you are actually selling a legitimate product, build your groups around that, and the people actually interested in it.
It's OK for the most part to add "random" folks to your social network, but make sure they are local and people you actually have a chance to directly message and start a conversation with. If you add a few hundred people and a few hours or days later you send some message blast about what you are selling, you'll lose respect and watch your numbers diminish quickly.
Facebook is good because your user-feed will populate to other users. It's not as flooded as MySpace is at this point (more does not always mean merrier), and the interface (while complained about) is still much cleaner and easier for other users to find your feed when updates happen. Keep some active messages going between walls of other users even if it's small talk. As you start to generate more "friends" (potential leads), you can slip in some updates of things you are working with. You may want to keep the subject rather vague and just slip the links in from time to time as to not come across as shoving your business down their throat. It's best they click because they are interested rather than they click because you requested them to.
On MySpace this becomes trickier as you only have a comments area to really toy with. Because the security levels let the users really lock their comments section down, unless you are seriously popular now, it will be very hard to be. If you don't have social skills now, it'd be recommended to start developing them now. Getting on a top ten friends list (top, period!) is a good way to get yourself out there, but you'll have to mitigate the random friend requests you'll most likely wind up with; think of those as "cold calls". Start a conversation with them if you don't know who they are and make yourself approachable. If people feel there is a human being behind that screen they are more likely to want to inquire not only about you, but what you do.
With that said, it's my personal feeling that while MySpace was the king of the hill last year, for marketing professionals online, Facebook is becoming the new playground.
If you followed my last post, I touched upon being offline to meet potentials. It's a great way to really get exposed, but always remember what you are selling. While it may be nice to be at every club or party having small talk and a drink, if you are selling land line phone service or energy drinks, you'll need to remember what that customer base consists of. A synopsis as follows:
- Landlines would be a target audience of more late 20's to 40's, mostly family-oriented people, who spend time at home and don't want to pay for expensive cell phone contracts.
- Energy drink people are more likely to be found in health food aisles and gyms. Join some yoga and healthy living online groups to find potential customers. They tend to be in their 20's to 50's and engage in at least regular daily exercise.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment