You must promote on social media!
So say the latest and greatest business books. But if you’ve launched your startup on social media, you might be starting to question this theory. You might find that posting on social media is taking up a huge proportion of your time. And you might find that people are ignoring your posts. No one is clicking. No one is buying. So you are probably wondering: why put the effort in?
Here’s the biggest misconception about social media: many people believe that by simply promoting on social platforms, you can win sales.
This isn’t exactly true.
It Isn’t Just About Selling
Social media is far more subtle than that. People use social media because they can express themselves in a fun and safe environment.
And the problem that a business has is that full-on sales promotion gives people the exact opposite emotion. It makes them feel threatened and they are likely to be put off by it. More recently, users are getting savvy to promotions. They scroll past it. Marketing efforts are easily ignored.
If you are using social media to promote your products and your services, and you are constantly seeking a sale from your followers, what you are actually doing is pushing customers further away from you.
That said, social platforms are not a waste of time for businesses. They just needs to be approached in a very different manner.
This Is What A Good Social Media Strategy Involves
A good social strategy is about building noise and building relationships. What do I mean by noise? I mean that people start to talk about you and your product. That’s what you should be working towards. The reason this is so important, is because social proof is such a big aspect to whether someone decides to buy from you. If they see other people talking about your company on social media, then they will see your company in a positive light, with a greater amount of trust and authority.
Secondly, social media is about building relationships. Strong relationships with businesses and people that are mutually beneficial will always be a great strategy for building a new company.
But where do you find these people? You find them on social media of course. So using social media to start a conversation with someone you’ve never met, and building a relationship, is something that is really going to help your business.
By using social apps to create noise and to create business relationships, you can really begin to narrow down your tasks and goals when you are on the platforms, instead of spending hours at a time posting sales content that no-one is going to read.
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