Social Media and its Role in Traffic Development

Making the Most of Social Media

While we will regularly place content on your LinkedIn and Facebook social media sites, this activity only represents half of the required job. Unless engagement with that content takes place, then the impact of the postings will be negligible.

Some may wonder what the point of posting to social media is, but when you think of these platforms in the context of the average person spending a little over 2 hours every single day on their favorite social sites, it should make a little more sense. This is where most of the population has chosen to spend a significant portion of their day, which is what makes social a good place for developing brand awareness.

There are two requirements to kickstart the effort.

1. All company employees must be encouraged to like, share, and comment on the content posted to your company pages. In doing so, the “reach” of the content is exponentially increased. To accomplish this, it should become routine for employees to spend half an hour a day performing this activity. By increasing the “reach,” we mean the number of impressions (appearances on members' timelines) will be increased. By increasing the number of impressions, the number of clicks will be increased, the number of website visits will be increased, and the possibility of earning additional likes, shares, and comments will also be increased.
2. It is desirable to make efforts to increase the size of the audience because the larger the audience, the greater the potential for likes, shares, and comments. However, we have to be careful when we talk about increasing the size of the audience because the audience must be carefully cultivated so that it consists of relevant members. If you sell into a certain geographical market and 90% of your followers are located outside that market, then the audience will be of little value to you. This is where the other half of the salesperson's social efforts must be directed.

Using social media to help develop sales opportunities while simultaneously working to increase the size of the audience.

Every salesperson has customers and prospects, and almost every one of these customers and prospects has social media accounts where they place their content as part of their brand-awareness programs. Just like you, they also want to grow their audience and for the audience to like, share, and comment on their postings. Think of this as an opportunity.

As we already noted, it is getting more and more difficult to get conventional sales appointments, so rather than flogging a dead horse, continuing to try and get appointments using yesterday’s approach, the tactics to get in front of potential customers and even existing customers must change. By liking, sharing, and commenting on your customer’s social posts, you will get noticed. Over time, the companies whose posts you engage with are more likely to follow and engage with your content. Using this tactic strategically and intelligently is far more likely to earn click-backs to your website and the possibility for ongoing engagement with your value proposition.

Liking and sharing content is an important activity for expanding the content reach (audience), and Facebook is an important platform to post to. However, Facebook is also frequently used by family and friends for personal posts, so it is important to establish a firewall between personal and business activity. The settings on Facebook for achieving this can easily be overlooked, so click this link to access a gallery of images that walk you through the required settings.