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John Danenbarger
If the Internet had been built for marketers, converting your message to sales would have been straightforward. Leads would build up naturally in your contact lists and turning them into customers would take no more effort than posting a tweet with a link or writing an email with a limited-time offer. But it doesn’t work.
It is often said that the Internet was built for information and for entertainment. The commercial applications became clear later, and that means the marketing tools online are blunter, clumsier, and less reliable than the kind of scripts handed out to telemarketers or the training undergone by corporate reps. When it comes to marketing through Twitter, for example, response rates can be low and conversions even lower.
The reason is obvious: How can I trust a stranger?
The conversion rates vary depending on the relationship between the tweeter and the reader. According to one analysis, the highest response rates are from members of communities such as churches, clubs, and organizations who are four times more likely to click a link in a tweet than followers of a business or a consumer site.
Right or wrong: “I trust and know my social crowd.” Prospects following tweets posted by a business will click a link only 2.2% of “reach,” with “reach” defined as the number of a profile’s followers multiplied by the number of tweets posted.
Obviously, an action from a prospect on Twitter isn’t just about the content of the tweet. With just 140 characters — minus the characters for the link — there will be little you can do to persuade someone to click through. The click-through rate will mostly be dictated by the nature of the relationship with the prospect. (And the sales will also depend on the quality of the copy on the other side of the link.)
Think of a “tweet” as a reminder: “Hey, I am here.”
You can think of this as a microcosm of the entire sales process. A sale takes place when a prospect gains trust. Only when a salesperson assures the prospect that his money will deliver exactly what the prospect needs will the prospect make the purchase and walk away from the deal satisfied.
All the presenting of benefits, the overcoming of objections, the attempts to identify stumbling blocks and reassure the prospect that you will deliver a solution to those problems are intended to build that trust.
A link placed in a Twitter timeline can be one attempt to close the deal. But before the deal is closed, you first have to build that relationship of trust.
Social Media Marketing is a technique with the “weakness” that the relationship is built slowly. Twitter is a small part of it, the least important actually. Part of that is because of the way Twitter works. Tweets appear on a timeline and are pushed down the page quickly as new tweets pile in on top. If little more than 2.2% of your followers are clicking your links, it is partly because less than half have seen it.
Repeating your tweets is one option, but a better choice is to make your tweet so valuable that readers click through to read it exclusively.
When your prospects trust your information to that degree, you have a level of trust high enough to feel confident that they will be clicking your links included in the tweet, too.
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