At this point in 2014, social media has been integrated heavily into our personal and professional lives. It’s no longer a “nice thing to have” but rather a necessity to reach maximum success with your sales.
Here are a few common reasons that I hear for not using social media:
- It’s too difficult to learn
- My company bans social media at work
- My buyers are not on social media
While these may seem like legitimate reasons to avoid social media at first, if you change your mindset and approach, you’ll realize that these issues can easily be overcome.
Leveraging social media does not necessarily mean pushing to get as many followers as possible, and posting/tweeting several times a day. While this approach will likely yield the most success (if done correctly), it can also be extremely time consuming and difficult to maintain on daily basis.
Consider a different approach. Instead of using social media in the conventional way, use it as a listening tool instead. Your prospects, clients and competitors are often making announcements, connecting with people, posting updates, and providing general information that you can leverage to gain more knowledge about your industry.
With such an approach, you do not need to learn the ins and outs of each social media website or become a social media guru. You simply must get accustomed to the basic interface, and look out for useful information that you can use to step up.
By becoming a social media listener, you don’t have to be active on social all day at work. Even if your company bans the use of social media, you can easily take a few minutes during your personal social media usage to look out for helpful information about your industry.
Also, the need to connect directly with your exact buyers on social media becomes a secondary point. There are thousands of individuals across virtually every industry that are active on social media that you can connect with and learn from. <– Click To Tweet
In fact, simply by having a profile on the more popular social sites increases your visibility and allows others to discover you even if you are not consistently updating and publishing content. Almost all of these social media sites allow you to link your website on your profile so others can get to know you without any effort on your part. Talk about easy!
Too many salespeople think that they must be active daily and posting content regularly in order for social media to work. While this approach does reap the greatest success, there’s a much easier way to leverage social. Simply commit to listening to what others are saying so you can stay ahead of new trends and ideas and use your increased knowledge to generate more success.
How often do you use social media to listen to others in your industry?
For more strategies that will increase your sales success, take a look at my new book, Nonstop Sales Boom!