Digital Marketing Consultant

Ask the Right Questions on Social Media

Start learning to sell and one of the first things you will be told to do is… shut up!  You ask the lead a question, and then you shut up.  You let the lead talk.  You listen to the answer.  And then you ask another question.  Through those questions and by giving the lead space to answer, you come to understand who they are.  You understand what makes them tick.  You understand what they are hoping to achieve with their business.

You understand how to position your product as the solution to their problem.

And if that does not work, you get to ask more questions to identify their objections and understand what it would take to overcome them. 

For most professional salespeople, that ability to ask and to listen comes naturally, as does the sequence of questions.  If you are cold-calling, the first question will be whether this is a good time to talk.  The next series of questions will about the lead’s business.  And the last questions will be to discover when you can deliver the solution to the problem they have just described.

That is cold-calling and we have all been doing it long enough to know how it works. 

The Question Process on Social Media is Sporadic

On social media platforms though, the process of questioning and listening is slightly different.  Shut up on a social media site and you may as well not be there.  You will quickly be ignored and forgotten. 

But that does not mean the process of asking questions and listening to answers does not play a role on social media sites.  It does.  It happens subtly and in fits and starts, through long-term relationships rather than attempts to close — but salespeople who know how to ask and react to answers will always have an advantage.

Because Twitter and Facebook are public (and anyone can fake an identity), they are also a little more limited but they can still useful places to gather information and begin the process of building trust and knowledge.  If you are sure the profile is real, you can shoot quick questions to someone at a business you are targeting to find out their plans and discover how much they are willing to talk.  And you can use Facebook to ask someone when they will be available.

The site that is most business friendly is LinkedIn.  The profiles are real.  The forum discussions bring together like-minded people and the conversations themselves usually begin with a question.  Everyone else then weighs in with their answers.  Take a look at the Sales Best Practices group, for example, and you will find other marketers wondering how to create urgency during cold calls or get past gate keepers. 

Those are valuable discussions, but they are places where sales people talk to each other.  Talking to potential buyers is a little harder.  You will need to have the connections first — something you will often have to pick up in the real world — but on a business-oriented site like LinkedIn, asking business questions does not look out of place.  While you might not be able to go through the entire sales process in the way you might do on the phone, you should be able to pick up valuable information from insiders — about who to call, for example, or what kind of supplier they are currently looking for.

I need to stress that there are many ways to use LinkedIn to find prospects.  But you have to do things right.

Social media cannot replace the complexity of a real conversation between a sales rep and a lead.  If you are looking to sell an expensive piece of equipment or land a long-term buyer, a virtual meeting is never as good as a handshake and a conversation.  But you can use social media to ask your first questions, keep asking questions over the long term — and know when to listen.

Choose the Right Social Media Channel for Your Market

Darren Rowse, of Problogger fame, is currently promoting a free webinar with professional blogger Ana White.   White, who lives in a house that she hand-built with her husband in Alaska, makes a living publishing a blog about DIY and furniture making.

That is not entirely unusual.  According to Forbes there may be as many as 3.9 million “mommy bloggers” and some of them have been hugely successful.  What was interesting about Darren Rowse’s marketing blurb though was the nugget of information that White’s most important source of traffic is Pinterest.  With a readership of around three million unique visitors a month, that makes the image-based social media site a hugely valuable source of revenue.

For many, particularly male, social media sellers, that might sound a little strange.  That Pinterest has undergone massive growth recently is well-known.  That investing time and effort in the site can produce more rewards than time put into Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn should be an eye-opener.

So when should you step away from social media’s Big Three and focus on one of the smaller services?

Who Uses Pinterest?

Demographics will play the biggest part, of course.  Pinterest is as much as 87 percent female and its users come from high-earning households.  That makes the site a good match for a female blogger writing about home décor that costs a bit of money.  But it also makes it a good option for anyone selling to female buyers — provided that they have good images of their products (pictures to which they own the copyright) and are willing to put in the groundwork to ensure that their images are spread across the network.  That means commenting on and repinnning other people’s pins, the same kind of activity that always works on social media.

Demographics of a different kind can make looking abroad an option too.  While social media marketers in the US like to talk of Twitter and LinkedIn as the biggest and most important networks on the Web after Facebook, both those sites are smaller than QZone, a kind of Chinese MySpace.  Sina Weibo, China’s main microblogging service has more than 300 million users — and the attention of many Western brands including Ikea, Nike and Luis Vuitton.  VKontakte is a kind of Russian Facebook with more than 135 million users. 

If you are looking to market beyond the English-speaking world then you should be looking at activity on one of the social media sites whose native language is not English.  That might not be simple.  You might have to hire local freelancers to do the tweeting and the posting for you, and if you cannot read what they are writing, you might have to give them a lot of trust.  But when you are starting from nothing, at least the results in terms of traffic flows and sales will be fast and dramatic as you make inroads into that new market.

Social media is not just a method of making sales; in fact, I would say that social media is mostly just support for sales and to build trust.  But each social media platform is a channel to reach a particular market.  You should be certain that the channel you use reaches the market you want to pitch — even if that means turning away from one of the big sites.

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Keep the Emotion in Social Media to Build Your Business

It is easy to be cynical about social media marketing.  As professional sales people we have to be hard-nosed.  We have to look at the figures and study the graphs.  We have to test headlines and measure response rates.  We have to identify the tweets that generate clicks, the posts that produce “Likes” and the content that translates eventually into sales.

We have to take the emotion out of social media and replace it with the cool, indisputable evidence of stats and figures.

Sometimes though it is worth remembering that all sales are based on emotion — and that emotion can be shared and triggered by the content shared on social media.

We were given a reminder of that this week.

“Pip,” a 17-year-old Romany student in the UK, posted an open letter on his blog to British television’s Channel 4.  The channel broadcasts a documentary called “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.”  In the US, the show goes out on TLC.   

Pip’s letter attacked the show’s makers.  It pointed out the program’s inaccuracies, accused the channel of spreading bigotry and suggested that it exploited children and encouraged bullying.  The letter was angry, eloquent, witty, and well-argued.  And it went viral.

A blog whose total posts number in single figures suddenly received 50,000 views as readers shared the link to the article on Twitter.  Pip’s Twitter followers rocketed past 2,000 and continue to grow.  The teenager was so inundated by media requests from television companies and reporters that he had to accept help from a PR manager to handle his interviews.

There were no sales here and the conclusion for many commercial users watching from the sidelines is that the affair is another warning about the public relations dangers of social media.  Channel 4 responded slowly and comes out fairly damaged. 

It is Not Just PR

But the ability of complaints to spread quickly across social media platforms is well known.  The need for companies to respond quickly to complaints is well-known too.  Doing it in a way that does not dominate a timeline and create the appearance of a business overwhelmed by unhappy customers is less well-known.  (Although Comcast does it pretty well by creating a special timeline for its customer service that does not interfere with its business tweeting.)

What is often forgotten though is how the right post at the right time, written in the right way and catching a popular mood can suddenly plug in to the power of social media. 

There was no reason that a blog written by a British teenager should suddenly have become so incredibly popular.  Pip’s previous posts had been infrequent and his tweets until that post had been largely about talent shows and what he was having for supper.  There was no marketing push behind it and certainly no budget.  And yet it made readers angry and supportive enough to want to share it with their friends — and sell them Pip’s viewpoint on his behalf.

You should be spending time looking at numbers and planning your posts.  But do not forget that social media is about relationships and those relationships are bonded by emotion.  Remember the old phrase: Sell the sizzle.  If you can make your audience identify with you anywhere close to the same way that Pip’s audience identify with him (he is no longer a pipsqueak), you can expect your firm’s online presence to have a strong foundation.

Addendum

You knew it was going to happen. You knew that just as you were getting to grips with Google+, becoming familiar with Facebook, and tackling Twitter, a brand new platform would come along and make you start all over again.

Or worse, it would not make you start all over again. It would make you wonder whether you should start at all.

That is the current position for social media marketers in relation to Pinterest. The site, which acts as a kind of public pinboard on which anyone can attach pictures and items, and share them with friends, launched in 2010 but has seen phenomenal growth over the last twelve months or so. In October 2011, it was valued at no less than $200 million.

It looks important. But does it look important enough for you to spend the time and energy building your own board, looking for effective strategies and trying to drum up business with it? Or would your time be better spent writing more Facebook updates and connecting with more people on Twitter?

Certainly, Pinterest’s rapid growth suggests that it cannot be ignored. In September 2011, it was said to receive around 1.68 million unique visitors. By December, that figure had reason to 7.21 million. The site is now believed to have overtaken Google+ (although it still lags behind Yahoo!) as the fifth most popular social networking or forum site driving referral traffic to other websites.

And yet, Pinterest’s demographic — like that of the somewhat geeky Google+ — is relatively limited. The site’s users are predominantly female. One estimate puts the population at about 58 percent women. And those users are largely looking to Pinterest for shopping. Some of the biggest corporate users of Pinterest are not JetBlue, known for its use of Twitter, or Coca Cola, which has an effective Facebook presence. It is retail stores like Nordstrom and West Elm. These are companies that pin pictures of models in beautiful clothes then see those images shared on hundreds of other pinboards.

If you are not in the retail business then, and your demographic is not the kind of people who are looking to buy clothes or improve their home furnishings, then maybe you can give the site a miss — at least for now. And even if you are in those businesses, you might want to give the site a miss too. The site might be driving traffic to particular kinds of stores and sites but there are no figures that suggest that that traffic is converting.

Social media marketers do have to keep their eyes open all the time for the growth of new platforms. They have to know when a new tool can deliver sales to their market better than a current tool. And they choose when the usefulness of that tool is clear enough to begin using it.

At the moment, anyone selling fashion, household items and lifestyle products should be looking at Pinterest, playing with it, and testing to see if it delivers convertible traffic. Sellers who are not in those fields should be checking the statistics on the site and waiting for signs that it might benefit them, too.

Mobile Phone Use with Facebook

• There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products.

Conclusion

The reality is Facebook is not a phase and is here to stay.  Businesses need to determine how they can monetize this network if they wish to compete and stay in front of their customers.  

Facebook can no longer be seen as the site where college students go to socialize about the latest fashion or party – as statistics show the fastest growing demographics two years ago was those 35 years and older, and today it is woman over 55 (InsiderFacebook.com).  In fact, 45% of Facebook’s US audience is now 26 years and older! Businesses need to consider sites like Facebook as part of their marketing mix; otherwise the risks of not being present can actually open the door for competitive or negative brand exposure.  

So if you have not already, it’s about time to give your online marketing strategy a facelift by joining Facebook!

A Few Tips about Facebook and Business

How do you get your branded name on Facebook?  

It is important that you build your Facebook Fan Page with your branded name as www.facebook.com/yourcompany.  Once your fan page has over 25 fans and you then can reserve a vanity URL for your business.  

How do you maximize your video optimization on Facebook?  

First, name the video file with your keyword phrase.  This is the method to indicate to the search engines what your video is about.  When you upload the video, Facebook will allow you to provide a title and Description of the video.  Make sure that both these fields have your keyword phrase.

How do you maximize your ads on Facebook?

Remember that Facebook is push marketing, more traditional, and different from Google Adwords in which people are actually searching for your products or services.  However, the ability to narrow down your exact audience provides an opportunity for your to connect to the right people.  

Keep in mind...

• Visit www.facebook.com/business to get started and to determine if there is a target audience on Facebook for your product or service based on the demographics of your prospects.
• Visit http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=861 to learn more about writing optimal ads, character limits, image size and resolutions, and terms and conditions.
• Always tag your ads using parameters in the destination URL, so that you can determine through your analytics which ad copy or image is driving the best results.

Get The Word Out!

Now that you have your Facebook Page, how can you let people know about it? Here are some different ways to promote your Facebook Page to your customers and start the interaction.

1. Send out an email blast to your list letting them know your organization is now on Facebook
2. Place a logo on your website that lets your current visitors know that they can follow you on Facebook
3. Run a contest or promotion as an incentive to get people to join
4. Run a Facebook Ad Campaign targeting your demographics and invite them to join your fan page.  Again incentives are great here!

 Facebook Events

Take the same scenario and imagine if you had used Facebook to post your event.  Remember Facebook was designed to allow information to be passed through easily amongst friends.  So this means if a user decides to attend the event on Facebook, a notification will be posted on their wall (page) letting their entire network know they are attending.

So in scenario #1 where you post the event on your website the user gets an email.  In scenario #2 the users confirms their attendance but at the same time their entire network now can see this – which might persuade them to attend as well.

From an admin standpoint, the Facebook Events feature allows you to send a direct message to all the guests you had invited, including those who have confirmed their attendance, declined or have not yet decided/responded.

Facebook Pages

A Facebook Page will allow you to build a business page for your organization, in which you can promote your products and services, connect with your customers and build your brand.  One of the main reasons businesses are afraid to build a page on Facebook is because they do not want to mix their personal lives with their business network.  

So for example, pictures of me at a New Year’s party holding 3 beers in my hand might not sit too well or best represent my organization to my business contacts.  However, there is a way to completely separate your business page with your personal account.  You do need to have a personal account in order to first develop the page, but the privacy setting will then allow you to have control of what information you want users to see and separate your personal and business account.

Once your Facebook Page is created, you can then start to populate it with pictures, images, information, videos that reflect your brand.  If you are already on other social networks such as Twitter, YouTube or blogs, there are methods in which you can customize your Facebook Fan Page to automatically pull information from those mediums into the Facebook Page.

Below is a sample of how a blog post is configured to go directly into a Facebook Page.

Not only does configuring your social sites (website, blog, articles, press releases, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) to work with each other save time, it will allow you to get your information out to your valued subscribers no matter which network they are engaged on.  Also from a search engine perspective, the more your content gets syndicated, the higher the probability of it appearing directly in the search engine results page.

The image below is from the Budweiser Canada Facebook Page, which shows you can really customize the look and feel of your Facebook Page to reflect your website, landing page, email template or offer.

How Can Businesses Promote Themselves On Facebook?

The number one reason why businesses do not adopt a social media strategy is lack of knowledge, according to a survey conducted by MarketingSherpa to small and medium sized businesses in 2009.  This is why when it comes to sites like Facebook most businesses do not know where to begin.  Depending on the goal of your campaign, below are some of the different strategies on how organizations can make Facebook work for them.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook Ads allow businesses to reach their exact audience and connect with real customers to your business.  For instance, if a business were to run an advertisement campaign on a search engine such as Google, they basically can target their audience by telling Google the following:

• If someone searches for this specific phrase (exact, broad, phrase)

• If someone searches for it in this region, radius

However, what if you wanted to narrow your exact audience even further and target those people who are male or female? Married? Divorced? Over a certain age? This is where social networking sites like Facebook shine as they are able to provide marketers the ability to target these demographics whereas search engines such as Google do not have the data of who is actually conducting the search.  As an example, if your target reach is men living in the United States that are married and over the age of 50, there are currently 2,260,940 users on Facebook that fit this demographic.

CM Photographic, a full service photography studio providing engagement, family, children and pet portraits leveraged Facebook Ads, which allowed them to target their exact demographic — 24-30 year old women whose relationship status on Facebook indicated that they were engaged.  Over 12 months, CM Photographics generated nearly $40,000 in revenue directly from a $600 advertising investment on Facebook.  

Of the Facebook users who were directed to CM Photographics' website from the ads, 60% became qualified leads and actively expressed interest for more information.