Social Networking is all about building relationships. It is about gaining Visibility and earning Trust. Eventually this leads to sales. That’s the 40,000 foot view. I will now share with you an actual situation I had earlier this week so that you can see it in action.
I posted a Twitter update about me saving three lives as a result of donating blood. This was a personal tweet that had zero to do with business. One of my Twitter followers re-twitted the post. For those of you who don’t know how I found this out, I had set up Twitter alerts that automatically scan all tweets that contain my Twitter name.
I proceeded to thank her by sending a direct message via Twitter – it is a good practice to respond to communications from people who engage with you via the same channel. She responded back to me and we now had a conversation going. She mentioned to me that she was also checking out the QuoteActions email marketing system that I developed.
I then went to her website, found her phone number and called her. We had a nice chat and she mentioned to me that she had been following me for quite some and that she really enjoyed my QuoteActions tweets. She then asked me some questions about the QuoteActions system and I encouraged her to take the free trial. Which she did.
I just got a notification that she purchased a 1-year subscription to QuoteActions.
As you can see from the example, I first built my Visibility and then I gained my Credibility with her. I was building a relationship with her without me even knowing it. The relationship got closer when she came onto my radar because of her re-tweet of my post. And it is now at the point where she has become one of my customers.
So was there any particular action that led to this sale? No. It was a combination of ALL my activities that caused this result. And therein lies the power of Social Networking. No activity by itself in Social Networking will lead to success. However when you aggregate all of the activities together, they become a very powerful force.Malcolm Gladwell does a great job of explaining this in his book The Tipping Point.
{ 0 comments… add one now }