You’ve decided you want to use social networks to market your business. Before you can devise a strategy, it is important that you understand the new medium in which you will be engaging.
No More Interruption Marketing
In the old world of interruption marketing, we were required to interrupt and shout. Television commercials are always louder in order to grab our attention and interrupt what we are doing. That behavior is no longer necessary. Your community wants real conversation and valuable information that only you can give. The relationship is the focus of your new marketing efforts. This one shift in thinking is what is necessary to really take advantage of the social network marketing opportunities that are waiting for you.
Preparing Your Buyer to Take Action
Social media prepares your customers to take action once you have established a relationship. Think of your sales as a funnel. At the wide top of the funnel are people who have just come in contact with you and your product. They are mildly interested and so they join your community by signing up for your email opt-in list or maybe becoming your friend on Facebook. They get to know you a little better. If they continue to be interested in you and your product, they will move further into the sales funnel until they are ready to buy.
Some people will not move all the way through your funnel. That is okay. In fact, that is what you want, because those who leave are no longer interested in buying. Those who are still interested, remain in your funnel. So as you network and interact with your community, you are now only interacting with members of your community who are interested in you and what you have to say. The funnel allows you to sort out those who are interested from those who are not. This process brings potential customers who are interested in you and your product. This process of building relationships and bringing customers further into your funnel makes it easier for your community to say yes when you ask them to take action.
Social Media Eases the Way
For buyers to buy, they need to:
(1) Know you
(2) Like you and
(3) Trust you
Social media makes all three of these not only possible, but easier. Your buyers will meet you on the networks. And once they’ve interacted with you for a while in a non-threatening way, they begin to trust you. And here is a secret, you don’t even have to make sales pitches. All that is required of you is to invite people to your community and get to know them. That’s it!
You can start your social network marketing today. Sign up for Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn. Spend time connecting with people and learning how to use the network. Then take this free access to buyers and pump up your profits!
Deborah Richmond owns TekkBuzz Internet Marketing, and teaches entrepreneurs how to market on the web. Her blog offers free information to entrepreneurs about using social media to pump up profits. You can get her free Ebook, “Pump Up Your Profits with Social Media” at 
Great post. So many people think they can get online to escape relationship building and it simply isn’t true. Relationships are key offline or on.
Thanks for sharing this really valuable insight. Several nuggets that I’ll use when formulating my next social media management strategy. Thanks again!
Nice post, I sure did learn a lot from your article, hopefully I might be able to integrate this new learned knowledge to a better use soon.
Hi there,Insightful post, although i’m more fascinated in what will come out of this google vs facebook social network war. I haven’t discovered much news on it recently, which most likely suggests that it’s not that far off, but i’ve got a idea its going to really mean several massive improvements to social networks. I think, i’d rather facebook left the war still in the lead because google’s already big enough, additionally they already hold a lot of data on everybody. I do not believe that the two can exist though, either google’s social network will control or totally crash. What does anyone else believe?