Easy ROI for Social Media: Permanent Contact Information
If you are in social media, I guarantee people are saying to you “I just don’t know if social media is worthwhile for my business.”
Here’s what you say back…
How much time and effort do you spend keeping your contact data up-to-date?
How many opportunities do you lose each year because your contact’s email changed?
What if you had a permanent way to stay in touch with people?
Even better, what if you had a way to keep an eye on what was going on with your clients and prospects? If you got a heads-up when they received a promotion or changed jobs, if you knew what was worrying them or what they were excited about…
That’s what social media does for you.
First, you get permanent contact information. People change their email addresses constantly. But they don’t usually change their LinkedIn profile or Facebook page. If you are connected to them in social media, you are connected to them permanently.
Second, even if your contacts are not particularly active in social media, you can keep an eye on the big changes in their life. Most people will keep their job information fairly current on LinkedIn. You can set your alerts to let you know when their title or company changes.
If they are active in social media, then you can get a whole lot more information. You can see what groups they are involved in, what questions they are asking, who they are connected to. That gives you a lot of information about what their current issues are, what is motivating them, what is keeping them up at night. This is insight about your prospects and clients that you never had before. Or at least not without a whole lot of work.
If you are getting started with social media, here are two important next steps:
- Start by connecting to all the people who are important to you on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Make sure you send invites to your clients, your partners, and your prospects.
- Add social media to your contact database. If your CRM doesn’t full support social media yet – and a lot of CRMs don’t – then use custom fields. Put LinkedIn URLs in one field, Facebook in another, Twitter in a third. If other platforms are useful to you, add them too.
What are your thoughts about having permanent connections with your clients, prospects and partners?
Theme 7: Ask for Help
Your seventh theme for social media marketing (and the last in this series) is to let people help you.
When you ask people for small favors – that they can easily do – you are helping them feel good about themselves. And then they also feel good about you.
I know, it sounds odd – ask for a favor and people will like you better – but that works.
So ask for favors!
Just make them extremely simple and painless to do.
It’s even better if you can ask a favor where helping you makes them look good too – where they can both help you and show their own knowledge and experience.
For example, if you ask for a suggestion for a restaurant in Boston, people get to show that they know Boston and have knowledge of the good restaurants there. That’s pretty cool!
If you ask for suggestions about whether to get an iPad or one of the newer tablets, people get to show that they have a lot of knowledge about the products.
So ask for advice.
You can look for business help:
- Vendors
- Tools
- Services
- Consultants
- Equipment
- Methodologies
- Techniques
- Coaches
- Seminars
- Training
You can also ask for personal recommendations and advice:
- Restaurants
- Shows
- Hotels
- Gadgets
- Tours
- Gyms
- Camps
If there are only a couple of choices, it can be fun to set up a poll and let people vote.
A couple tips… Only ask for one favor at a time, and keep it simple to do. Ideally it should be something they can do in a couple seconds – it shouldn’t require a lot of thought. You also don’t want to ask them to put themselves on the line in any way. It shouldn’t be risky.
But do ask regularly. People love to help, and if you make it easy you will find that you can grow your circle substantially. What are some ways you’ve asked people to help?
Theme 5: Show That You’re Connected
Your fifth theme for your social media marketing is to show who is connected with you. This is the whole point of social media!
If you can show that other people – particularly people your prospects respect – have checked you out and decided to get involved with you, then it’s easier for them to make the same decision.
So find ways to let people see that you have important people in your network, great customers, talented people working with you, respected people who refer business to you.
On Facebook, make your featured likes people your prospects will recognize and respect.
Retweet what influential people say.
Comment on blog posts of influencers.
Interact with customers or partners (especially those who are well-known and respected).
Talk about employees and subcontractors – if they have impressive degrees, I’m sure you can find a way to work that into the conversation from time to time.
Mention your board, advisors or investors.
Talk about really good sessions at conferences or webinars you attended.
Quote people your prospects respect.
Be grateful for any honors or awards you receive (or are nominated for).
Think about who your prospects and customers respect, and look for ways you can show connections with those people.
How do you build credibility by showing that you are connected to people your prospects recognize and respect?
5 Ways to Use Fiverr
If you haven’t heard about Fiverr you need to check it out!
It’s a website all about things people will do for $5. You can search gigs – people who have posted what they will do for $5 – or submit your own requests, saying what you would like to have someone do for $5.
Of course there are lots of weird things, lots of useless things. But there is a lot of cool stuff there.
Here are 5 ways you can use Fiverr in your marketing…
Buy inexpensive gifts for clients
If you want to find low-cost gifts you can send by email to your clients, you can find an amazing array of options on Fiverr. For example:
- Have your client’s name written in the sand of a New Zealand beach (I bet that becomes their new desktop background)
- Have a poem written about your client
- Get their photo turned into a cartoon (I bet that turns up on their mobile phone)
- Have someone sing Happy Birthday to them in a video
Get better known throughout clients’ companies
When you want more people inside your client’s business to know about you, one way to do it is to have something unusual done with their business logo. For example:
- Have someone put their logo on an umbrella and take a video of someone walking in the rain with that umbrella
- Have a video of a parakeet walking across a page with their logo
- Have someone do speed coloring of their logo
- Have the logo put onto a picture of a pumpkin (like we did here)
- Have a bunny eat the logo
- Get the logo stenciled on the foam of a capuccino
Seriously, you can get all of those things on Fiverr right now for $5. And you just know those videos are going to get forwarded throughout the company.
Add funny videos to your YouTube channel or Facebook page
There are a fair number of people who are offering to do a video for $5, and a couple who are offering multiple videos for $5. You can do all of the same things listed above for clients for your own company instead – those are funny, quirky videos that will engage your visitors and get them to comment on your posts.
Get feedback on your website or blog
If you want a man-on-the-street opinion from someone you don’t know, want it fast, and don’t want to spend a lot, try Fiverr.
Buy opinions from 5 or 10 people and you’ll have some interesting feedback for a fraction of what it would cost any other way.
Buy Facebook fans
If you have just launched your Facebook page and you want it to look lived in right away, buy a couple hundred fans for $5.
They won’t interact with your posts or buy your products – all they do is like your page – but that’s enough to allow you to get a branded URL for your page (Facebook currently requires 25 likes before you can get that).
Check out the site – I’m sure you can come up with dozens more ways to use Fiverr to promote your business. If you’d like to share them, comment below.
Theme 3: Care about Quality
A third theme for your social media marketing is quality.
Let people see that you care about quality and excellence. Everyone wants to know that if they buy from you, you will deliver as promised, and they will get good results.
Show them that you care about delivering a high quality product or excellent service.
You can do this in a lot of different ways…
You can respond quickly whenever any problems surface. Twitter is good for this – if anyone complains or has problems, you can let everyone see how quickly you respond and how helpful you are.
You can share customer quotes and testimonials that talk about how pleased people are with the quality of work that you do.
You can congratulate employees, subcontractors and partners who go above and beyond to deliver excellent results.
You can talk about what happened on those rare occasions when quality was not up to par – what did you do? How big a fuss did you make? How did you fix it?
Something that is very easy to do is to appreciate quality and excellence wherever you encounter it. If you received excellent service at a restaurant, share that. If your coffee was made perfectly, tell people. If you met someone who absolutely delighted you with their service, tell the story.
Talk about your initiatives to improve quality. Maybe you are a Six Sigma fan. Maybe you are a process fanatic. Maybe you are all about continuous improvement. Let people see that you care and that you are always working to improve. That impresses people!
Know your numbers – let people see that you monitor quality and track results. Talk about the improvements you see.
An extremely easy way to do this is to share quotes from people who talk about quality and excellence, like W. Edwards Deming.
The most important message here is that you care about making sure your customers have a good experience – that delivering quality is important to you. How do you let people see that excellence matters to you?
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