Do I have your attention?
Everyone is talking about how great social media marketing is for your business and how you need to be on there for your business. I am here to tell you that you need to learn to step away from it. Now before you go thinking I am nuts and how is it that I think you should step away from social media when all the experts say its good for marketing, hear me out.
First off, before you go much further with any social media, think about where you are putting your efforts. I see so many people using the wrong platforms simply because they were told social media was good for business. For example, some good friends of mine at DNV translations provide professional Dutch to English translation services for legal documents. Most of their customers would be lawyers and notary public in the Netherlands. Do you think Facebook or twitter would be great for them or a waste of time? A better place for them more likely is Linked In and creating a professional profile with the business owners and working on getting endorsed by people in the industry.
After you have established the right social media to use, lets discuss how you can move away from it. That’s right, I am suggesting you set it all up, get traffic, likes, re-tweets and all that jazz, and now you need to start to move away from that platform. What you need to do now is turn social media followers into leads. You need to get them to follow you away form the social media platform, and into your email list. There is many ways to do this, and to deep to get into right now. I would rather get into why you need to do this.
Most important reason you need to convert your followers to your email list is to increase sales. Now you have this person hooked in and getting direct content from you which you are able to track what they are doing with it and take action with the results. Secondary reason is you cannot trust Facebook, LinkedIn or twitter to be in the best interest of your business. At the end of the day when you are looking out for your business, Facebook, twitter and all the rest are looking out for their businesses. This means finding ways to generate income. So what was once free way of marketing your business may now cost you money. We see an example of this with Facebook changing how your posts from your business page show up on your followers news feed. If you want to make sure you get a viral effect, you have to pay a little. Another unfortunate scenario is that some businesses can fail or collapse. What happens if tomorrow Facebook fell off the face of the earth? Your now hundreds or thousands of contacts are gone. These potential customers will no longer have access to you instantly and you will need to try and re-gain those numbers on another platform.
In todays ever changing internet, what’s a trend today may not be tomorrow. You need to take control of your followers you have gained on social media, and find ways to get them to provide you with their contact information so you own it, not another company!
