The Chameleon - Adaptive Marketing Ideas For Your Business

The Sales Potential from Social Media

Of necessity, today’s B2C or B2B sales or marketing professionals must be proficient at “social selling.” Social media’s current audience of 1.48 billion consumers continues to expand daily. If you can connect with only “one-tenth of one percent” of this audience, you reach a million consumers at minimal expense, since you can use most social media for free.

A few months back I wrote about the perceived generation gap and inbound marketing, and how companies can bridge that gap through embracing social media marketing.  Recently, I’ve either heard or stumbled across a few things causing me to revisit this topic, but from a slightly different perspective...actually engaging in online conversations.

For those of you who didn’t grow up with my father, the golden rule simply states, “do onto others as you would have done onto you”. As I look around at companies today, all I see is the cracked foundation of the pedestal upon which the standard of client treatment once perched proudly. Sure, there are places you see patches where someone attempted to fix it and hold it together, but in the end the core continues to crumble as companies forget their clients are actual people, not cogs or numbers in a spreadsheet.

There are multiple social media platforms popping up every day and entering our vernacular, from Snap Chat to Vine to Secret, and I am sure just typing this a new one came onto the scene, so how do you know if you are successful in this new landscape? For the purpose of leveraging social for business, I am going to focus on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and define what success looks like in each, as well as provide one key tip!

What

Before I go into how to use hashtags, let’s start with what they actually are.

“Using hashtags to categorize Tweets by keyword: Peo

ple use the hashtag symbol # before a relevant keyword or phrase (no spaces) in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets and help them show more easily in Twitter Search. Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows you all other Tweets marked with that keyword.” - Twitter

A lot of people and companies get caught up with how many fans, followers, and connections they have. While steadily increasing your network is important, don't judge your success on social media only by the size of your reach, but rather the quality of your connections.