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| Generate Social Media Engagement |
I just read an email tip about how to use social media for marketing your business and the gave 7 easy steps to follow. Sounds good doesn’t it?
Step number 4 caught my eye though… Generate engagement. Sounds even better on paper! I will just get thousands of follower and then I will get them engaged in a living discussion about my business and they will have to buy something… They won’t have a choice!
If you can’t tell, I am being sarcastic here. If it were as easy as crossing “generate engagement” of the checklist then everyone would be successful already, and we would all be on permanent vacation. This is why, I have started this blog, “Following The Like.” I have read dozens of books, articles and emails about how to attract followers, but very little about what happens after the “like.”
So you can communicate will thousands or millions of people with a simple status update…
- How does that make you money?
- What do you say?
- How exactly do you generate engagement following the like?
I have an answer for you, but you are not going to like it… You have to work hard and you have to be able to sell. These days, it seems like everyone wants to take the easy way out. They want the quick buck, the magic words, the social media bullet that destroys your old sales records and shoots you into early retirement. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist.
Communication skills, sales skills, and the ability to engage a person in a meaningful discussion are learned and perfected over time. They don’t just happen, and they don’t happen quickly. Sure some people are born with the gift of gab, but that doesn’t mean anyone will buy from them, and more often than not they over-talk people and end up failing to listen. Great communicators and salespeople are trained craftsman. They study communications, psychology and motivation, and they practice and perfect their delivery.
Over time, on this blog, I will attempt to help you do the same. I will share thoughts, tips and stories to help you perfect the art of communication in order to motivate and mobilize your social media followers into fans and buyers.
Here is teaser of my step one:
Stop what you are doing and listen! Think about it for a second. We have a social media world larger than the population of the US online posting about themselves. People are starved for attention, and they are dying for a person who listens and who cares. People love great listeners, people love people they can relate to, people love to belong, and they love to be heard.
I will share more later, but for now just listen and be real. People are bombarded with thousands of sales messages a day; adding your two cents will most likely not be heard anyway. So many companies are out there pushing products, it is impossible to pay attention to them all. So what is a business to do? Listen. How many companies can you name that are listening and following your updates? How many are responding with thoughtful, emotionally real comments without a sales message? That crowd is a lot smaller.