You hear it many times from people. ” I never get any business from Facebook!”. People are convinced that the biggest social media outlet in the world doesn’t generate any revenue for them.
Sorry to say but if you can’t figure out a way to generate business from Facebook, you won’t be able to do it on any other social media platform. That will be a sad future 5 years from now.
Most of us will make the proper adjustments if they had the proper tools. Well here are 3 things to avoid doing that will make the world of a difference.
1. Adding Your Competition
This goes for mainly people in the sales industry. What we see most of the time is 90% of your friends (outside your family) are your other sales buddies or the people you met at a sales conference. Why would you befriend your competition? The only thing that is going to do is create an audience of people that will duplicate what you are doing! How many of those friends will refer you business? Yea the answer is none!
“Well what do I do then?”. Im not saying delete all these people at once. This is a good way to create unnecessary enemies. What you do is put all the people that are in your industry in one group on facebook. Then set your post settings to exclude that group.
After that, Get a list of your current and past clients. Put them in a list and start joining in on their posts and conversations. Start becoming friends with their friends and once you’ve started talking with them, add them as a friend! Boom, you’ve now started building a friends list of potential clients!
2. Sell On Each Post
Another common mistake on Facebook is that people start trying to sell and pitch their audience every time they post.
Most people, actually almost everyone, on Facebook are looking to catch up with their friends. So since you’ve established new friends that are potential clients, start sharing what you love about your job. Instead of “If you need a website call me” post “Just finished another site for a client. Love the work I did, just another day in the office!”. In that second example I just told everyone that I do websites, I have clients, I love what I do and I’m successful at it. All by sharing, not selling.
3. Lurking
I hope this isn’t you, but I have to bring this up. Social media is to be social, not scrolling. You have to interact. Imagine that one person alone at a bar with the same drink, not saying a word and just starring at everyone. Pretty weird hu? Well scrolling down your feed without liking or commenting (or any interaction) is the same thing. Start interacting with people.
I have a ritual every morning: 5 likes, 5 comments and 5 personal messages to just say hi. Why? to stay in peoples lives. Most people won’t voluntarily let you know what they’ve been doing or thinking the last few weeks, but they’ll let Facebook know. Use that to your advantage and build relationships with all your friends. When they ask you how you’ve been let them know about your current client and how you love what you do. Give them an interesting story about you and your client. You’re reminding them you’re in business without selling them.
Plus people don’t answer their phone anymore, but they’ll respond to a Facebook message in a heartbeat! 🙂
Avoid these 3 things and follow the solutions I added and you will see results. I know we did!