Are you hoping and praying that your social media will work?

This article is an excerpt from Karen Skidmore’s new book “Shiny Shiny: How to stop being a social media magpie.”  If you are interested in getting one of the special launch copies, click here for more information.

Please help my tweets grow my business

Some of you will not have dabbled yet, I’m sure. The shiny toys won’t have tempted you. But, the lure of the shiny new world of marketing has captured many of you and I am pretty sure that many of you related to that story of Rebecca at the start of this book.

Facebook and Twitter have to win the prizes for being the two biggest knee-jerk social media sites out there. Because many of you probably started to use Facebook for true social sharing and signed up because your “real-life” friends and family were on there, it’s easy to start dabbling with a Facebook Page and try using it to promote your business.

Twitter, on the other hand, makes it so simple to set up a new account that it’s hard to believe that all you need is a name, email address and password and Bam! … you can tweet to the world.

However, when you do set up your Facebook Page or Twitter account, it’s easy to wonder what all the fuss is all about. It doesn’t become the holy marketing grail that you had hoped it would be. It hasn’t made a slightest bit of difference to your bottom line.

If you worked your way through the previous five steps outlined in this book, you will have probably worked out what you are doing wrong already and be deciding what actions to take to start getting it to work. But, if you’ve come straight to the back of this book and decided you wanted to skip through all the hard work of getting your website, blog and email marketing working first, here are the problems you will – and may be already – encountering.

Reasons why your social media marketing won’t work

No target audience. This is THE biggest mistake that small business owners make with all marketing activities. As I’ve explained throughout this book, it’s not just a social media mistake. If you don’t take the time to identify exactly who you want to reach out to, then you may as well stand on your local street corner and hand out leaflets to every passerby. One day, someone may be interested … but that’s an awful lot of leaflets.

No objectives. Again, not just a social media mistake, if you don’t know what you want to achieve, how will you know whether you have been successful or what actions need taking each and every week. If you haven’t taken the time to decide what results you want, don’t bother setting up a social networking profile in the first place. It will be a waste of your time.

Lack of content planning. There’s nothing worse than starting the week and avoiding your new shiny Facebook Page because you haven’t got a clue what to post on your wall. It is a drain on you, both financially and emotionally.

No personalisation. How personal you get does depend on your business brand. But hiding behind your corporate logo is just not going to work on social media for a business like yours. You don’t necessarily have to use a photo of you on your social networks (although I do recommend that you do) but you do have to be “you” when using social media.

Sharing really private stuff is not necessary either, but there will be some public private stuff that will make you human. See later in this step for more on this topic.

Chasing numbers and pleading for more fans. Numbers do make you feel good. It’s great to be loved by hundreds of people, isn’t it? But numbers don’t always guarantee success. It’s the engagement you get with those fans that will build trust with your brand and ultimately help turn them in to paying clients. And nothing looks more desperate than regular tweets and posts asking and asking and asking. Create great content and you naturally attract the right people to you.

It’s all about you. Even though you have to be “you” on your social networks, that doesn’t mean you become a business bore. Sharing stuff about your business and making special offers all the time is boring at best, spammy at worst. You’ve got to ask yourself “What’s in it for my network?” Share stuff that interests your fans – trade secrets, useful resources, funny videos, latest industry developments and sneak peeks of new products. Much more on this later.

Automated feeds. Automating one or two things to be posted on to your social updates is OK, but be careful of making all your status updates automated. Again, this topic is covered in more detail later in this chapter.

No marketing systems behind your social media activity. And the last, but quite possibly the most frequent mistake made, is if you don’t have the right marketing systems working for you – taking interested people from your social networks in to your website(s), on to your mailing lists and building relationships with them in your own home – then you run the risk of being a popular, but very poor person.

Make the take the time to go through each of the five steps outlined in this book. If you ensure you know who it is you want to engage with, have a website, blog and email marketing systems set up with the right free offer(s) available, this will rocket fuel your social media success.

Click here to find out how you can grab yourself a copy of Karen’s new book; hot off the press!

Rebecca is a coach. She wants to help women who have experienced bad relationship breakdowns. She’s got a basic website together, printed some business cards and a leaflet but she hasn’t a clue where to start finding her new clients.

She’s been along to a local networking event and met an approachable chap called Simon. Simon runs a coaching business too and is proudly tweeting and updating his Facebook profile at regular intervals during the meeting.

Rebecca has heard of Twitter and Facebook. Both seem to be in the newspaper headlines most weeks because of some footballer or Big Brother star that have got themselves in trouble with a tweet or two.

But how do you use Facebook and Twitter in business?

But she’s not really understood why anyone would use them in their business. Simon is full of enthusiasm. He tells her that he spends most of his day tweeting, commenting and liking and proudly explains that he’s up to 5,412 Twitter followers and it won’t be long before he has reached his maximum number of Facebook Friends.

Simon is “talking” to people all over the world and he’s always on the look out for the latest app that will help him reach out to more people. His Klout score is up, he’s listed on all the Twitter directories he can find and regularly checks (and tweets!) his influencer ratings on any website he can find that shows it.

Impressive Stats, Simon!

Rebecca is impressed and is very excited to get back to her office to sign up to all the websites Simon has recommended.

She spends the next couple of weeks sorting out her new accounts. She begins to realise that what seems simple to start is beginning to get more and more complicated. Rebecca decides she needs to learn as much as possible about this new social media world and reads every blog she can find.

So much to learn … and most of it for free

She starts signing up for all the dozens and dozens of free webinars and teleseminars that promise to show her the “quickest and fastest way to make money on social media”. She’s trying out a couple of websites that promise to give her 10,000 new followers in the next month … all automatically, without her having to do a thing except grant access to her account.

She begins downloading apps on to her phone to help manage her social media accounts so she can keep up with it all, even when she’s away from her desk. And she loves having an email come through alerting her to a new follower – after all, it’s only polite to check them out, reply to them and try to start a conversation every time.

Rebecca is beginning to feel like she knows what she is doing. She’s loving all this social media stuff and spends hours on it every day. She’s even been able to give other people advice on how to set up their profiles and has even written a few articles for her blog on how best to use social media to grow a new business.

But wait!

Wasn’t Rebecca a coach? A coach who wanted to focus on helping women who has experienced a relationship breakdown?

What has “how to use social media to grow your business” articles got to do with dealing with emotional rejection?

Why would you be impressed with social media influencer scores when all you care about is how to mend your breaking heart?

The reality is that Rebecca may have a few thousand Twitter followers, be chatting to friends on Facebook all over the world and got herself a 87% influencing rank according to one website, but her bank balance is looking rather small.

What’s happened to the income?

All this focus on the latest social media sites and the applications that are designed to improve your effectiveness and efficiency in building a business has only resulted in Rebecca feeling very, very poor.

Yes, a few clients have called up and arranged some 1-2-1 sessions. But these few clients are not going to allow Rebecca to feel her business could support her, let alone her family and partner’s expectations for her to contribute to the household budget.

Unfortunately, Rebecca has become victim to the virus that is infecting today’s entrepreneurs and small business owners …

… The Magpie Syndrome

This excerpt has been taken from Karen’s new book due out on the 1st February.  To find out more and how you could get your hands on a special VIP copy, go to www.ShinyShinyBook.com (If only to check out my Brownie picture from when I was 9!!)

Remember the human beings sitting right next to you!

As tweeting and facebooking becomes more the norm at networking events and conferences, social media is starting to affect people’s sociability.  I’m sure we’ve all tutted at some point or another at the growing concerns that children spend more and more time glued to some form of screen.  But have you stopped and looked around you at the last networking event or conference you were at?

The adults are all doing it too!

I was an all day event last week.  Drove up to Birmingham and there must have been 50 odd people in the room, all coming from near and far.  We were all there to learn about marketing and come away with business ideas, so it wasn’t your typical networking event.  But networking was still to be had as we milled around, drinking coffee, waiting for the event to start at 10am.

As I looked around the room, I was amazed as I counted a dozen or so people engrossed in their phones.  Whether they were tweeting, checking emails or just adding their Farmville estate – I don’t know.  But these tiny glowing screens where sucking the sociability out of them.

Sure, a few of these guys would have been nervous, possibly one of the first few events they had been to as a business owner. I remember that feeling of “Oh gawd, I feel like a fraud.  No one is going to believe that I am capable of working for myself!!” and hanging around the coffee table, smiling nervously at anyone who would care to glance my way.  But these blessed smart phones are creating the perfect excuse to hide.  To avoid jumping in at the deep end and introducing yourself to someone … who may just be your next client.  Or at the very least, may know someone who could be your next client.

Two years ago, tweeting and facebooking was a novelty at events like these.  The very fact you were on your phone updating one or two of your social profiles created a conversation point.  Others craning their necks to see what you were doing and you were able to share your knowledge on how these tools worked.

But now, everyone has Twitter account (although they may not know what to do with it!!).  I love social media – don’t get me wrong.  It’s now become an integral part of many small businesses marketing strategies.  And tweeting and facebooking during events can be a useful networking exercise … in moderation.

The excuse of being able to tweet from a live event so that you can share with your countless online friends what and where you are, only distracts from the very essence of what you could be doing … interacting with some real, live people.

Look up from your smartphone screens, people!  Don’t play in your virtual world when you have real, live potential contacts and clients right there in that room with you.

Photo credit:  Adam Timworth

Have you got a fan in the office yet?

Facebook Fan Pages have been a hot social marketing topic for the past year, especially since the new look changes made a few months ago.

Small businesses are beginning to realise the potential that Facebook offers, but it’s still a confusing place to be.

How do you get your first few fans?  How do you keep getting fans?  Do you really need to spending all day and every day, getting new fans?

I’m exhausted just writing it!

This week I’ve been sharing some top articles about managing Facebook Fan Pages over at the Web Tech Marketing Club.

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Here is the weekly round up:

• How to get your first 25 Likes on your Facebook Fan Page
• Why I think you have to have a personal profile on Facebook first before starting your first Fan Page
• 10 “set and forget” way to get people to Like your Facebook Fan Page
• Why Facebook Likes are not enough

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Hope they are useful and do share your thoughts or comments below.

If you are interested in finding out about Facebook and other web tech marketing tools such as Twitter, blogs and email newsletter, then do check out what the Web Tech Club has to offer.  There is already instant access to April’s Web Tech Training Session “Facebook Marketing” – an hour long training session that you can watch and learn straight from your PC or laptop.

Wanna Connect?

Out of the all the social networks, LinkedIn is the one that feels safest for most small business owners. You are on LinkedIn to talk business and do business. There is none of this confusing funny cat video sharing or having conversations about what you’ve had for lunch.

You turn up on LinkedIn suited and booted, ready to connect with other business people. But when it comes to sending out invitations to connect on LinkedIn, how personal do you get?

The problem with sites such as LinkedIn is that it’s easy to click the links and send stuff out. To most of you, this may not be a problem. You want everything to be made easy. But when you get a message in your inbox like this, how does it make you feel?

Ummmm, I’m not a colleague of yours. I don’t work in the same company as you!

Or what about this one?

A friend? Nope, don’t know you! Don’t believe I send you a Christmas card!

There are limitations to the invitations you send out on LinkedIn. Absolutely. You have the choice of adding someone to your network by adding that they are colleague, classmate, friend or you’ve done business together. If you choose the “other” option, you have to add their email address here and hope it matches the one that they use on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn give you these options because they want to connect with people you know. It’s not a site you dive in to “collect” email addresses (although lots of people seem to!!).

So rather than just click a box and hit the send button, why don’t you take a moment to add a personal message.

Yup, this takes time. Yup, you have to think about why you want to connect with the person. But how much better is it for the person receiving your invitation to have something like this arrive in their inbox:

Or what about this:

You don’t need to write war and peace. Nor do you have to try to be clever, witty or intelligent. Just make it personal!

You should be able to guess why I would respond to these type of messages and quite often ignore the first ones.  And if you are just clicking and sending, you are probably getting lots of connections … but how many of those connections are likely to turn in to potential leads and a referral network for you and your business?

Make the effort and get your LinkedIn connections working harder for you.

By the way – the number one place this lack of message adding seems to happen is on the LinkedIn phone apps. It’s too easy to be on your iPhone LinkedIn app, cruising around and clicking the connect button! Stop – think before you click!

For more top LinkedIn tips and ways of getting LinkedIn working harder for you, join me this week on this month’s Web Tech Training Session. Click here for more details.

Thanks, but I think I'll pass on this occasion!

Setting up a Facebook Page is simple.  Within a couple of clicks, you can set yourself up and have a new way of reaching out to potential clients.

In fact, it is so simple that many small business owners find themselves setting up a Facebook Page without much thought – usually late at night when they are tinkering around on the internet.  And this is where the problems start.

With little thought on who they are reaching out and no plan on what to actually share on their new Page, they do their best begging for fans and focus on getting people to Like them, only to give up and lose momentum when they get at a loss on what to add to their wall.  Another Facebook Page gathers dust, left alone feeling very sad and ignored.

Not  a good impression to give your new potential client, hey?

It’s tough coming up with fresh, unique content so it’s easy to give up before you even begin.

But what if you didn’t have to come up with new stuff?  What if you just shared other people’s stuff on Facebook?

As long as you are revealing the full source – a link to the article, a link to the Facebook Page where you saw it – it’s perfectly OK to share other people’s stuff on Facebook.  In fact, it’s actively encouraged! Sharing is the currency of Facebook.

So what can you share on Facebook?

1. YouTube videos: What interests your target clients?  Is it easy recipes for working mums?  Is it golf techniques and putting skills?  Is it recommendations for wedding venues and ideas for flowers?  I can guarantee that what ever it is, you will  find umpteen videos on YouTube about that subject.  And Facebook users loooooove their videos!
2. Latest news: Surf the national newspaper sites – The Times, Daily Mail or Guardian.  What headlines are worth sharing and commenting on?  Copy the link to that specific article or use the Facebook Share buttons on the sites.
3. Interesting blog articles: If you aren’t subscribing to the top blogs in your profession, then get to it!  Set up a free account with Google and use their Google Reader account to subscribe to the blogs that you find.  Once a week (or once a day – depending on your routine) scan through the articles and share one that your target audience would find interesting too.
4. Other Facebook Page’s Updates: When you are logged in as your Page admin, you can Like other Pages as your Page.  Updates from these Pages will appear in your Page’s Newsfeed.  Click the Share button and add your own comments.
5. Your Favourite Tweets: Use a RSS Feed App to automatically post each tweet that you favourite (click the star icon on the tweet in your newsfeed).  The feed for your favourites is http://twitter.com/favorites/YOURTWITTERNAME.rss (UK Readers: note the american spelling of favourites here).  Add this to a RSS Feed App such as RSS Graffiti or Social RSS and synch it up to your Facebook Page.  I wouldn’t recommend you do this too regularly as Twitter language doesn’t go down too well in Facebook, but the odd one or two every week can work.

So don’t freeze like a rabbit caught in headlamps trying to come up with fresh stuff every day.  That’s exhausting and can put too much pressure on you.

Share other people’s stuff on your Facebook wall and give your target audience the information that they want, in one central place.  Ask questions about what you share and give your thoughts, too.  It’s a great way of starting conversations and showcasing your expertise.

What other stuff do you share on Facebook?  It would be great to have your ideas on what you do, so do leave a comment.  Thanks.

Photo Credit: LizaWasHere

photo © 2008 Massimo Barbieri | more info (via: Wylio)
Setting up a Facebook Page is fast becoming one of the biggest knee-jerk reactions to peer pressure that small business owners will make this year.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see it submitted as a new sport for London 2012’s Olympics!

If you are out networking or reading the headlines of business related blogs, it is easy to feel that overwhelming guilt.  You feel you HAVE to set up a Facebook Page just to stay in the game.

But when you do set up your Facebook Page, you wonder what all the fuss is all about.  It doesn’t become the holy marketing grail that you had hoped it would be.  It hasn’t made a slightest bit of difference to your bottom line.

All it has seemed to do is give you one more thing to worry about during your busy working week.

Facebook marketing can work for your business and with more than 550 million active members there is every chance that potential clients are logged in right now.

But Facebook won’t work if it is a knee jerk-reaction to peer pressure.

Here are the 7 reasons why Facebook doesn’t bring in new clients or have the cash register ringing day and night.

1. No target audience – This is THE biggest mistake that small business owners make with all marketing activities. It’s not just a Facebook mistake!  If you don’t take the time to identify exactly who you want to reach out to, then you may as well stand on your local street corner and hand out leaflets to every passerby.   One day, someone may be interested … but that’s an awful lot of leaflets!

2. No objectives – Again, not just a Facebook mistake.  If you don’t know what you want to achieve, how will you know whether you have been successful or what actions need taking each and every week.  If you haven’t taken the time to decide what results you want, don’t bother setting up a Page in the first place.  It will be a waste of your time.

3. Lack of content planning – There’s nothing worse than starting the week and avoiding your Page because you haven’t got a clue what to post on your wall.  Having your Page hanging around your neck will drain – both financially and emotionally.

When you start out, posting something 3 or 4 times a week is usually a good benchmark to aim at.  But for some of you, that may even feel too much.  Take the time to plan out topics that would interest your fans so you’ve always got a list of ideas to work from.

4. No personalisation – How personal you get does depend on your business brand. But hiding behind your corporate logo is just not going to work on Facebook.  You don’t necessarily have to use a photo of you as your Page photo, but you do have to be “you” when using social media.

Sharing private stuff is not necessary either, but there will be some public private stuff that will make you human.  Here’s a link to another article that should help you with all this public, public private and private stuff.

5. Chasing numbers and pleading for more fans – Numbers do make you feel good.  It’s great to be loved by hundreds of people.  But numbers don’t always guarantee success.  It’s the engagement you get with those fans that will build trust with your brand and ultimately help turn them in to paying clients.

6. It’s all about you – Even though I’ve already pointed out that you have to be “you” on Facebook, that doesn’t mean you become a business bore.  Sharing stuff about your business and making special offers all the time is, well frankly, boring.  You’ve got to be ask yourself “What’s in it for my fans?” Share stuff that interests your fans – trade secrets, useful resources, funny videos, latest industry developments and sneak peaks of new products.

7. Automated feeds – automating one or two things to be posted on to your Facebook wall is OK, but be careful of making all your wall posts automated.  Change it up a little from time to time.  Manually post a link to your latest blog article and in the comments below, ask a question.  Try it.  You may find you get that little bit more engagement from your fans.

When done wrong, Facebook becomes a weight around your neck.  An unloved, dusty looking Facebook page can actually work against you.

But when done right, Facebook marketing can work.  It can drive traffic to your website, help build your email mailing list and attract more of the right clients to your business.

Just make sure you start with identifying who it is you want to engage with, decide upon your objectives and plan you content.

If you want to know how to develop your Facebook marketing strategy in more detail, then check out this month’s Web Tech Training Session “Facebook Marketing: The What’s, the Why’s and the How’s of Using Facebook to Promote Your Business”.  Live and interactive event happening on Wednesday 30th March. Click here for more info

OMG! What did you just tweet about?

Whether you have started using social media in your marketing or not, there’s not a day that goes past without some celeb or footballer getting in trouble from one of their tweets or Facebook updates.

It seems that when it’s just us and our iPhones, it’s easy to forget that the messages we send out on Twitter or Facebook can reach anyone, anywhere in the world.  A drunken Friday night tweet seems funny at the time … but what if one of your clients sees it whilst sitting on their sofa at home?

Ignoring emails from a customer who is complaining about one of your products, whilst glibly updating your Facebook status with a “Don’t you just hate it when someone moans all the time and is not happy with what they get” is just going to set you up for a fall.

We’ve all seen this kind of stuff somewhere on the internet – or even in the headlines of the tabloids.

But does this mean you should be afraid of sharing too much private stuff on your public profiles?

If you just stick to business all the time, the “social” side of social media ignores you.  They turn their back on you and report you for spamming.

So, how public do you need to be about your private stuff to make social media work for your business?

There are 3 categories that I think most of your thoughts, feelings and ideas fit in to:

1. Public: this all the stuff that is about your business, your events, your products.  This includes launches of new programmes or workshops, appointments of new staff, winning new projects or new articles on your blog.  It’s all the stuff you really want potential clients reading about you and your business.

It tends to be the positive news you want to share, although every cloud usually has a silver lining so don’t be afraid of sharing bad news if you can find a way to add value from it.  Avoid the doom and gloom, but sometimes a honest bit of commentary makes you a “real” business.

2.  Public Private: the stuff you what you want to share with the world about you as a person.  This includes your personal thoughts about the latest industry developments, conferences or events you go to and what you had for lunch.

Yes, that’s right – what you had for lunch!

To make social marketing work, you have to be social.  And if you think about what you talk about when having “small talk” with someone you’ve just met, the topics usually focus on the weather (well, for Brits!), where you’re off on your hols this summer and what drink or food you are currently consuming.  So when people who just don’t get Twitter and wonder why anyone is interested in whether you had a bacon sandwich or a bowl of soup today, it’s because you are doing “small talk”.

Do it all day and every day, and it is very boring.  But make your public profiles a little private – share a “secret” or a personal fact about yourself – and you are able to show you are a human being and a very nice person to be doing business with!

3.  Private: stuff your customers really don’t need to know about you. This includes your kids’ names, your car registration number plate, your home number and the name of your bank.  Some of you, I know, do share stuff like your kids’ names.  And that’s OK as long as you consider this to be Public Private stuff and you don’t mind the whole world knowing this.

Announcing when you plan to go away on holiday is a common crime, especially if you work from home.  Why not just tell the local thief network when your house if going to be vacant?!

You want to avoid sharing anything that may cause clients to leave you in droves.  Remember the comment Gerald Ratner made about his jewellery in 1991?  It caused the company to go from a £112 million profit to a a £122 million loss a year later!  And that was all before the share-ability of social media.

I have a little rule when it comes to sharing stuff:  If it ends up on the front page of the Sun or the Times, I wouldn’t be worried my mum were to see it.

You can be as public or as private as you want to be on social media – the choice is yours.  As much as people moan and complain about Facebook and the default setting of “share everything with everyone”, you can tighten up your privacy settings as tight as you like.  You don’t have to be found if you don’t want to.

But just be prepared if what you share does get found.

If you want it kept private, then avoid those drunken Friday tweets and early morning Facebook rants!

Take your time over the company set up form

LinkedIn have been releasing some lovely new features to their company profiles over the past couple of months.

Competing alongside Facebook Pages, you can now add banners, videos and testimonials buttons which synch up with your website. Rather nifty!

But before you go dashing off creating your own company page, here 5 important things to consider:

1.  How do your clients think of you? LinkedIn is a valuable online professional network, but the reason is works so well is because it’s “you” that potential clients see.  They can check out your credentials, your previous career history and see what you look like – if you have a decent photo, of course!

If you are your business, do you really want to start acting like a company?

Of course there will be some of you who really can’t promote yourselves as a table-top business because that’s not the image your clients expect from someone in your industry.  But for most of you reading this, you probably pride yourself for being a home-working entrepreneur.  As soon as you create that company profile on LinkedIn, you have to back up that company brand.  And if your clients are looking for a “company” to work with, it could be diluting your efforts.

2.  How many profiles can you maintain … effectively? Your online branding and social media results are far more effective when you focus on a smaller number of profiles.  Leaving your digital footprint everywhere may create lots of links to your site, but if those footprints look dusty and out of date, the potential clients who find them may will be put off.

3.  Once created, almost impossible to delete. Once you have set up a company profile on LinkedIn it is almost impossible to get rid of it if you don’t want it any more.  So if your business evolves over the years and even changes it name and focus (and I know my business has certainly done that over the past 6 years!), then you may be stuck with a company profile floating around that you don’t want.

Yes, you can remove yourself from that company as an employee – but you have to go through the LinkedIn powers to get it deleted.

4.  How does that company look on your profile? Once you have created your company, LinkedIn asks what type of company you are – sole proprietorship, limited company, etc.  This will appear on your profile, next to your employer name on your CV.  So if you are branding yourself as a “company”, having the tag “Sole proprietorship” on your CV, kinda defeats the object.

So if you decide to create a company profile, don’t rush through that form.

5.  Which profile do your clients follow? If you are your business, then creating two different ways of potential clients to connect with you may cause confusion.  I know I experience this with Facebook – some people like to be my Friend but I try to keep my personal profile for “real” friends, family and people I have met physically or virtually elsewhere.  And others find me on my Page.  If someone I don’t recogonise sends me a friend request, I often point them in the direction of my Page instead.

After all, you have to be aware of your personal privacy and what you are sharing with the world.

As Facebook is more of a social network than LinkedIn  - it’s about connecting with friends and family on Facebook whereas LinkedIn is a suited and booted career and business platform – it makes sense to seperate out the business side of you if you use your Facebook profile for personal use.

But LinkedIn is all about business so there is less of a need to separate these two personas.  Why confuse your potential clients with multiple points of contact?

Creating a LinkedIn company profile may be the right thing for your business.  And if so, have some fun with these great new features.

But don’t get caught up with competing with your neighbours.  Just because him-over-the-road is polishing a new car, doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go out and get one too!

It’s great to get feedback and suggestions from subscribers to my Twitter Checklist.  And as this question seems to come up from time to time, I thought you may enjoy it as a blog post.

Twitter etiquette: How do you sell on Twitter, without doing the hard sell?

Including the words “Selling” and “Twitter” in the same sentence can send some social media enthusiastics in to an anaphylactic shock!

If you were to ask most marketers who use social media, they would fiercely deny that you can ever use Twitter to sell.  Social media is social in it’s very nature and if you were to start touting your wares like a double glazing salesman, then no one would want to be social with you.

Hard selling on Twitter is like the person you meet at a networking event who seems more intent on handing over his business card to everyone in the room, before driving off in his BMW and on to the next one.  Everyone avoids him and his business cards usually end up in the bin.

But if you can’t sell on Twitter, why use it as a business tool?

Is marketing selling?

First of all, let’s dispel the myth that all marketing is selling.  Selling happens when a potential client makes a decision and expresses an interest in what you do.  They may ask you about the price of an event, they may call you up asking about timeframes and delivery options.  They want to buy and you are there to sell to them.

But this process doesn’t happen at the beginning.

Very rarely does your potential client phone you up on that very first contact and ask whether you take Visa or just debit cards.

For most of you, they may cruise through your website.  They may search for you by name to check out any reviews online.  They may sign up for your Free Report and read your emails for a few months.

This whole process of building trust and rapport happens over time – sometimes a few weeks, sometimes a few years.

This communication is marketing.  And the selling only happens when they are ready to buy.

How do you market on Twitter?

So, the question really should be re-phrased and the word “selling” replaced with “marketing”.

And, to go one step one further, you could re-phrase it to ask “How do you communicate on Twitter?”

Communicating on Twitter just seems a whole lot easier, doesn’t it?

Ask me to sell on Twitter and I could give you tweets that involved lots of “Special discount on membership if you buy today” or “3 for the price of 2 if you click here right now”.

By all means, tweet these from time to time.  There’s no such thing as the Twitter police and you ain’t gonna get thrown in Twitter jail for tweeting this kind of stuff.

But, tweet like this all day and Twitter is going to be a very lonely place for you.

Ask me to market – or communicate – on Twitter and I can give you tweets that involve “Can’t believe they killed off Harry on Silent Witness” (that conversation lasted all day yesterday!!) or “KitKat or Hobnob? What should I have with my cup of tea?” (biscuit tweets are great fun and involve lots of banter).

But Harry and KitKats don’t sell my business!

I know!

But the relationships you build up with the people who follow you, do.

And that’s how you sell on Twitter.