Using Social Media to Sell Products and Services

More businesses harness the power of social media to sell products and services every day, but often come to realise it's not all easy as pie. Social media is a vast ocean of voices and different platforms where you’ve really got to know your tweets and your fleets from your stitches and duets. So, where do you turn? 

Start by taking stock of who your customers are and where you’d find them online. Are they recruitment professionals that live for LinkedIn? Teens who spend a couple of hours too many on TikTok instead of doing their maths homework? Foodies who prefer Instagramming their food over eating it? Or vintage clothing aficionados whose evenings are dedicated to trawling the local Facebook groups? 

 

Once you figure this out, you know exactly who you need to be interacting with and which platforms they can be found on. Make these platforms your priority and don’t stretch your online presence too thin. 

To succeed as a business using social media to sell, it's vital that you build a relationship with your followers by talking with them, not at them. You might well have an all-singing, all-dancing product or service, but if you don’t join the conversation, you’ll go under the radar. 

 

Don’t just chuck out sporadic social media posts talking about how great your product is. Provide regular, meaningful content that demonstrates your understanding of the needs of your customers. Always reply to comments and regularly share informative posts, quirky pictures and entertaining videos. If your social media interacts with and provides value to your audience, they’ll come to trust your business as one with a finger on the pulse of your respective trade, be it civil engineering or sports coaching. 

 

Use your social media content to build relationships. Sales will soon follow. 

Speaking of trust, social media presents the incredible opportunity for user-generated content, where you can turn your customers into some of your greatest salespeople. 

 

Think of it this way, if you’re a bike shop on Instagram, try starting a hashtag that’s unique to your brand and encourage customers to add it onto their own posts. When they inevitably upload a photo of their bike in front of a picturesque view after a 30-mile ride, their friends see that hashtag and immediately get the impression your cycles are lovely and reliable, especially if their bike-nut mate is taking the time to give one a photoshoot. 

 

We humans do love to follow the crowd, so make sure to be worth following. 

Ultimately, you’re using social media to drive sales. Always try to round out your content by encouraging further interaction with your business, whether that’s by hitting the follow button, dropping you a message, clicking onto your website to learn more, or indeed buying a product straight up. 

 

If you’ve put in the work, provided valuable content and built trusting relationships using social media, your followers will more than likely become customers. This can then be nurtured into serious loyalty in the form of brand advocacy, but that’s a story for another time. 

Need help solidifying your social media presence? Click on over to the contact form and drop the Penguins a message.