As a professional in our industry, you probably differentiate between your online and offline activities. You may further differentiate between your personal online activities and your business online activities. Or you may just find the whole thing a gigantic distraction. In any event, today I’d like to talk with you about why you may want to use social media to lead your prospects and clients off of social media.
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Today want to touch on something that I recently discussed with our Inner Circle and SmartEQP members.
Your Social Media Persona
Let’s think in terms of social media that’s designed to help our business. We can begin by thinking in terms of our online persona. This refers to what we’re communicating online. Meanwhile, our offline persona is about what’s happening in real life.
For most people, there’s usually a bit of a disconnect between those two things. We don’t share everything that’s going on — though it seems some people do.
Some people go onto social media to complain about things. They gripe about their lives, share every frustration and eventually just repel people.
Am I being too candid?
If you are using social media for business, I strongly encourage you not to engage in that approach.
Staying Positive
For the most part, in business, it’s usually a good idea to put our best foot forward. Keep things forward thinking and uplifting. Focus our comments and convey our personality as positively as possible.
That’s not to say you can’t share the occasional frustration or “rant,” but when it gets to be too much, it can easily drive people away.
Let’s face it, if you want to convert online leads into sales, people will have to like you. They’re going to have to want to interact with you, and much of that boils down to the way we communicate… how we put ourselves out there.
When you start to think in terms of using social media to get people to interact with you offline, for business purposes, or to engage with you through your sales funnel, it should have a definite impact on what you’re doing in much of your communication.
In some of my previous podcasts, I’ve talked about the direction of your communication. Where does it start out and where does it lead? What is the direction of your social media?
In my view, the best use of social media is to encourage people to interact with you OFF of social media. That could start by directing them to your blog site, where they can opt-in to receive a special report or free video series. It could direct them to your company website where they can sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your podcast. It could invite them to lunch, or to get together for a meet-up.
So why do we want to use social media to lead your prospects off of social media?
Well, aside from the obvious distraction, diversion, competition and sensory overload that are the hallmarks of social media, we all see, over and over again, how the rules, functionality and algorithms in social media change constantly, to reduce access and limit communication.
It used to be that you could post something on social media and it would be shown to the people you’re connected with. Now we’ve reached a point where, if you put out a post, they may show it to your people… or they may not. In fact, if you don’t pay extra to boost your post, it might be just a tiny percentage of your connections who will be shown the message, which means even a tinier percentage can actually read it and respond to it.
If we just post cat videos, it doesn’t matter too much. But if we put out a thoughtful, compelling message that we want our prospects and clients to see, then deliverability is important.
While we can’t control what people will read or respond to after it’s been sent to them, we’re certainly better off if we can get them to a place where we can control the communication that we’re sending. Even the lowly email gives you far more control than social media, because when you send an email from a non-spammy address, you can be pretty sure it will actually go to the designated recipient. Which is something that is no longer even remotely guaranteed in social media.
So how do you feel about the idea of using social media to lead your people off of social media? Do you love the idea? Do you hate it? I’d love your feedback on this topic. Just enter it in the comment box below.
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