Some may say that getting your business’ content out across social media channels is the job of the marketing team but in fact I believe if your sales team or even your general staff aren’t on social media every moment they are in work, then your business are missing a trick.
Whilst doing my usual job, sitting at my in house mac computer it came to me something my boss had said during the weekly business update call.
‘please share our articles,news and content with everyone socially, whether on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other platforms it really helps’
I knew I was already reposting the business message out on all my main social media platforms but then I thought to myself, ‘I wonder how many social media platforms are the sales team on.’ Luckily, my work table was sat at the foot of the kitchen in an open plan office so when a sales member entered the door I questioned the poor unwitting soul.
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Interrogation of how much social media do my colleagues use
Being nosey and generally wanting to help improve the company’s brand awareness I asked a team member of the sales team ‘do you have a Twitter account?’ and to my surprise he replied ‘no’.
I feel like this was a missed opportunity for any would be sales team member as I believe by your business’ employees building networks on as many social media platforms as possible ‘can’ increase your networks & ‘can’ generate leads. For example, just a week ago I received three enquiries for freelance work, I have found a possible lead by speaking to a cloud computing provider as well as speaking directly with a radio DJ (based in the locality of the service the company I work for provides ) about advertising the product on their radio show. All this was done by building a genuine network on social media, the potential of digital networking is huge AND global!
Not only sales, but everyone should be more social
I mustn’t make our team sound anti-digital social media as they are definitely not, they tend to use LinkedIn and they have quite a good success rate with this platform but its more helpful if you have a large network of various people with varying skills and interests on different platforms in different formats ( video, text , sound and infographics ) to draw interest to the product being sold it is of greater benefit to the sales team and also means the potential for more commission.
To be frank, a lot of people don’t really understand how to use each social media platform effectively as a sales tool ( even I am still learning day to day! ) and just how much potential benefits of learning how to use them correctly and the opportunity it can bring by taking the time to learn.
Common thought from a novice user of social media
Why would you tweet 140 characters, who is going to bother to read it?
This is a common misconception that crosses the minds of many a novice tweep. When you start developing an effective network you will find conversation, mutual respect, RTs, FF and more are common place, as well as the slightly pointless ‘thanks for following’ which do sometimes become quite tiresome.
Your business’ social network : Twitter Example
I imagine a lot of business owners now realise that you should be on social media regardless of your industry and having a genuine network that is 2000+ strong per social media platform is of equal importance but it doesn’t end there! Your business is the first stepping stone in the equation but if you have 20 members of staff all with 2000 followers and who regularly tweet out your information your are increasing your reach by 40,000 as well as your business account!
This sparked the idea for this blog post, maybe ALL employees should be on ALL social media building separate networks and having their accounts actively open in the background whilst they are working.
As you probably know, Twitter is pretty straightforward to get the most from and takes such a small amount of working time to use if managed properly. Below is a simple 6 step guide to helping your employee’s build their Twitter network.
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Helping your team build their Twitter network
1. Set up your employee’s social networks with social media accounts and relevant profile designs that reflect the brand. The description should inform the twitter user what industry they specialise in, that they work for your business and that their tweets are their own ( should anyone post something they shouldn’t ).
2. Purchase a justunfollow account that is a high level allows others to add their twitter account to justunfollow.com, copy 150 to 200 followers a day and then the next day unfollow the people that aren’t following back.
3. Creating Twitter lists and categorising users into specific blocks as they follow you also helps to build relationships on the social network.
4. Retweeting of ‘other businesses and people’ should be done 3 to 5 times per 1 message that they send out and spread out the tweeting throughout the day. NOTE : As soon as you have a new article make all the sales team aware and get them to RT.
5. Set up a fun/clever automated DM ( Direct Message ) on justunfollow. I found by having an automated DM message basically promoting that I have a FB page in a tongue in cheek way sparked conversations with people, generated leads & also increased awareness and likes on my Facebook page rather than just following, unfollowing and RTing.
6. Lastly, the use of one or two hashtags per tweet is also good practice to help get your content found but don’t make every word a hashtag, its classed as spam and uninformative attention seeking rubbish!
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I hope you have found this blog post useful. If you already allow your employees to use social media how are you using it? Or are you afraid to embrace and risk the change of direct communication with potential customers and partners through social media incase you say the wrong thing? Please share the post and leave a comment in the box below.
