The dream is starting a business, getting it on social media and it becoming so popular you have trouble keeping up with your orders but are grateful for the growth of your business. The reality is that social media sales are sold separately. Selling on social media is complicated because it’s a case of balancing between doing the things you should do and avoiding the things you should not do, as appealing as they may seem. What we’re going to discuss today are things you may be doing that are getting in the way of your social media sales success.
Not consistent
We see a lot of this on social media. Everybody wants to make that one post that goes viral and in so doing opens the sales floodgates. So people will post here and there when they think they have something good to say or try to trend surf in the hope of catching that one wave that will deliver customers to them. This hurts your chances because what people are after is consistency. If I’m looking for cleaning services I’m looking for a provider who consistently shows me that they are about cleaning. Consistency isn’t just the frequency of posts as you’ll see in the next few paragraphs.
Not optimised
The second big problem is not optimising your social media content and posts. Don’t worry, optimise is just a fancy word for tailoring, which is what you should do. As a business, you should have to deal with customers or groups of customers, with a target market. It doesn’t end there, your content should be catered to the target market as much as possible and that means everything from the copy, the references and even the placement. If this sounds complicated it’s because you either haven’t decided on a target market or you don’t understand them well enough to be selling to them.
Always selling
Time to throw the cat amongst the pigeons. We’re talking about getting sales through social media so it may surprise you that always selling is a hindrance to your sales but it is just that. Social comes before media for a reason. It doesn’t matter how good the product is, if all you ever do is tell people to buy your product they will tire of you. There’s a lot more you could do like tell people more about the people behind the business, how to care for the product going forward, what they can combine the product with and so many more. It all depends on the product of course.
Not supporting community
I have a problem with the conversation around people not supporting businesses. Every time I look at successful businesses I see businesses that support communities and not the other way around. OK supports communities by providing a variety of consumer goods, Mazoe supports communities by providing world-class cordials and every success you can name is a business that supports a community. And your business no matter what you sell has some sort of community built around it. So it’s important to show support for the community through your products and activities.
Not engaging
Finally, a lack of engagement severely hurts your ability to sell. Earlier on we spoke about always selling and how that is detrimental. Well coming to social media to say what you have to say and then leave without interacting with others is just as damning. People know who you are and what you’re about through how you interact with others and social media is a great place for showing this. Engaging does all of the things we have mentioned in this article. It gives you consistency beyond just posting your posts. It helps you optimise because you get to know your people better. It puts in time that is not all about selling and it embeds you within the community you serve. Engagement could well be more important than any other type of social media activity.
Read more extensively on these five areas so you can start getting these mistakes out of your system and open yourself up to improved social media sales.
