Social Media Marketing for The Sales Professional

After a long hiatus from blogging for myself, I am back with some information for the sales professional. Yes, social media can be a distraction but it can make you work less (4 Hour Work Week style) and make you more money than ever before. Yes, you may have heard this in a seminar that got you fired up but you did not execute on the plan. Or, maybe you did and are getting some results but maybe have not taken it to the next level. In the event you are looking to work less and make more money (I do not know anyone that will disagree with this thinking), here are some ideas to put into action:

1. Revisit LinkedIn – With over 33 million users and now getting 1 million users every 2 weeks (up from 1million every 4 weeks earlier this year), your prospects are here. Better yet, if you have a blog and have powerpoints that you publish on SlideShare.net, you have a license to promote your services in your profile and be the hunted in social media.

2. Get Active in Twitter – I now use twitter to update all my social media profiles like Facebook, FastPitchNetworking.com, my blog, Plaxo and many more. Better yet, Twitter is a great tool to find people and businesses that you have things in common with…common ground is the basis for long term relationships. A great example is a friend of mine who started following (hunted) a CEO on Twitter he wanted to land as a client. He suggested a great Sushi place to him because he learns from Twitter this CEO loves sushi and a few months later, there are working together.

3. MRSS – Wikipedia says: Media RSS (MRSS) is an RSS dialect used for syndicating multimedia files (audio, video, image) in RSS feeds. It was designed in 2004 by Yahoo! and the Media RSS community and adds several enhancements to RSS enclosures. Mint Social created 10 videos for a client from a 1 hour interview, researched the most relevant terms and optimized the content before we syndicated it to 50 of the top video and blog websites like YouTube, Revver, Viddler, etc. and generated thousands of views within the first month and created stacked (multiple) rankings in the search engines for over 20 of our targeted terms. Request a copy of this case study by completing the form at the end of this post.

Social media marketing is really about listening to the conversation going on about your market, identifying the key players and competitors and engaging in the conversation. Everyone loves to ask the question, what is the ROI on social media. Well, one of the best sources online that you can subscribe to is LinkToYourWorld.com for great information on social media. They did such a great job of answering this question, here is an excerpt from the article titled “What is The ROI for Social Media?”

How and Why Do You Measure Relationships?
Any good sales person will tell you their number one objective is building relationships over time. Yet few if any company bothers to measure the cost of building relationships rather they measure the results of relationships. Measuring the results doesn’t tell you “how to build effective relations” or “which methods create the best relations.”

Relationships come from human experiences, not corporate spin and hyped promises. Human relationships are measured by trust, sincerity and common values. If you want a return on social media then focus on conversations that build lasting relationships based on value exchanged and create great experiences. Why is ROI so important? Because that is all you know how to manage. Get it?

Great stuff. So, get engaged in social media, especially if you are a sales professional and make your life easier. Here is a parting tip to think about. If you lose your job, you take with you your social media network. If you have 500 people in your network associated with your expertise and industry, do you think another company in that space would be interested in your network?

Request a case study below on Social Media Marketing Success Stories