I see Social Media as the “wild west” of home based business. It is a vast expansive space of opportunity combined with all kinds of dangerous pitfalls (not the kind of danger that can harm you physically like the wild west wilderness was, but the kind where you can really hurt your business if you don’t know what you are doing).
My expertise is in the personal interaction and relationship side of business. Interpersonal communication, leadership, and the process of successfully engaging with people through the process to build a business. It’s how I have built my businesses and how I have mentored and coached others to success over my 28 years of experience.
I am not an expert in how to use all of today’s technology and social media opportunities, though I have been stumbling my way through and making lots of mistakes as well as having some success doing it, and have been pouring myself into educational opportunities to learn what I don’t know. I’m not the fastest learner in the world, but I am dogged in my learning so eventually I get there. Here are four absolute tips that anyone can use to help them begin building their audience and contacts through social media.
- Do not post the name of your company or product all over social media– The simplest reason is that once you do this you have lost control of the information flow. As soon as someone sees the name, if they ARE curious, they can leave your post and go search the internet. You have now lost a potential contact. That’s the surface and easy reason to understand. The second reason is deeper. People aren’t on social media to buy your product or sign up in your opportunity. But they might have a need or desire that you can help. Which leads to the third reason, which is that social media is a powerful source to create connections and engage with others, so if you provide content of value that interests them, they will engage with you and you will have an opportunity to connect with them, uncover their need, and then provide your solution
- Be Consistent– Post your content on a regular basis. You can decide what this is. Once a day? Twice a day? three times a week? It depends on what you want to do and how much you want to be engaging. The idea is to broaden your audience and expand your reach as you post and engage. So post consistently and engage with others consistently. If people like your content they will know they can trust that you will show up on a regular basis.
- Provide Value-Regardless of what you are working with, there are all kinds of associated bits of information of value that can be beneficial to people outside of your actual product or service. This positions you to be someone who already helps people. For example, if you market a product for skin, think of all the other things related to skin that help the skin that you can talk about and share.
- Call to Action– A call to action on Social media can be as simple as saying “private message me if you want some more info.” And you do want to keep the deeper conversations that might lead to your product in the private communication world, this relates back to number 1!
