This section talks specifically about using social media to build a sales pipeline that can be integrated into your company‟s current sales process. In this section, you‟ll find answers to questions like:
How do I drive traffic to my site?
How do I collect prospects information?
How do I turn prospects into leads?
Social media is a wonderful method for driving sales for your company. Using social media as part of your company‟s sales process is similar to any other method you might use. Use social media to generate prospects, and then capture prospects as leads.
Finally, once you‟ve captured your lead list, you can put those leads into your current sales process.
Find prospects
In social media, generating prospects usually means driving traffic to a website where you can collect lead information.There will be more information about collecting leads in the next section. In the viral marketing section, there was information about how to find your company‟s target audience. Naturally, finding prospects for your sales pipeline will be much easier the more you‟ve connected with your audience on each of these platforms, in the form of subscribers, followers, fans, and friends. Now that you have an audience on several different social media platforms, here is how your company can drive traffic to a website with specific tools:
Blogs – One of the reasons every company should have a blog is because it adds text to the company website that attracts search engine traffic. Also, your blog can build a subscriber list of people who read the content regularly. Companies use blogs to have conversations with potential clients or customers and build credibility within the industry.
Some ways to optimize your company‟s blog include: promoting and republishing the content on all profiles, responding to each person‟s comment individually, making the RSS feed prominent (in the right hand corner) and putting links to all other social media profiles in front of the reader.
Facebook – Facebook has a wide array of options for companies, including, groups, fan pages, applications, and Facebook Connect.
To find clients on groups, start a group that is related to your company. If you have a company called Costumes „R Us that sells theatrical props, very few people will join a group called “Costumes „R Us.” People will, however, join a group called “Sound of Music fans” or “I love Guys and Dolls.” The nice thing about groups is that the administrator can send messages to the entire group, similar to an email list.
Facebook fan pages are similar to groups, except they are usually named after the company. With fan pages, your company can import blog posts, videos, and fans are able to leave messages on the wall. One special feature of fan pages is that people who are fans can recommend the fan page to their entire friend list at once. This is unlike almost every other Facebook feature, which only lets a user invite 20 of his or her friends per day.
When considering a Facebook app, remember that the types of applications that most Facebook users like are games or quizzes. The best app would be if you can turn your product or service into a game with lots of levels, where there was incentive for players to recruit their friends to the game. If you were Costumes „R Us, a trivia quiz about musicals and theater productions where a player could challenge his friends would work well.
Twitter – The best way to find prospects on Twitter is to build that following! There are tips on how to do this in the viral marketing section of this book. Once you have a following, you can publish links to your website manually or by feeding your company‟s blog into Twitter using a service like TwitterFeed. This won‟t be true of everyone, but as a rule of thumb, Twitter users generally feel that 20% of self-promotion is the right amount. That means for every link to your company‟s site, post 4 links to other interesting resources.
StumbleUpon – If you want to get your article to do well on StumbleUpon there are a few ways to optimize it.
First, make sure you have a very strong title. Many StumbleUpon users don‟t read a post to the end, or they vote for it to remind themselves to read it in full later. The strongest of titles are the ones that indicate the post is a list. Lists with items in the 70‟s and 80‟s or higher do very well – in fact, the bigger the better when it comes to lists. The next thing is to make sure you optimize your company‟s website to have as little clutter as possible at the top so the post is the foremost thing on the page. Finally, add a
stunning image near the top of the post, embedded in the text to make the post stand out.
Once the post is optimized, there is an option to send the post to friends on StumbleUpon and ask them to vote for it. If the post is doing well, you can give it a push to get it to StumbleUpon‟s front page by paying $0.05 per targeted hit.
Digg – Many of the same techniques for optimizing a StumbleUpon post also apply to
Digg. One thing that‟s essential for Digg is putting a Digg button in the top right hand corner of the post, embedded in the words. Also, Digg‟s user base is very targeted and skews heavily towards twenty year old males, so unless your content appeals to that demographic, it probably won‟t do well.
A few other things to realize about Digg is that it is a user-driven site that has a small group of power users who control most of the content that hits the front page. If content is submitted by one of these power users, it is much more likely to get to the front page. Also, the Digg algorithm rewards content that gets lots of votes quickly – say within the first 30 minutes of submission. Finally, Digg allows people to talk about the submitted article on its site, and articles that have a conversation in the comments section tend to get more Diggs quickly.
