It’s no secret that social media is a key component in any successful online (and mobile) marketing strategy these days. While real-world advertising and SEO are still important aspects of building a brand, increasing visibility, and growing a company’s presence, it seems that those who are able to crack the code and infiltrate social media are far more likely to increase awareness, drive in new traffic, and ultimately, make more sales than their competitors. So what’s the big secret? You’ve hired yourself a ghost tweeter to keep your account active and you’ve got a crack team of college kids posting on your Facebook wall. So why aren’t you experiencing record-breaking sales? The truth is that there’s a lot more to making social media work for you. And in his audio book, ‘This is Social Commerce: Turning Social Media into Sales’, author, speaker, and journalist Guy Clapperton will give you the 411.
According to Clapperton, the main problem is that businesses simply don’t understand the scope and potential of social media platforms. While everyone seems to concede that it is important to engage in social media, creating business profiles as a way to connect with the consumer public, many don’t have the first idea about how to use these tools effectively and garner the results they crave. It has become clear that setting up accounts and leaving them idle is no good, but there’s more to it. Even engaging customers ad nauseum won’t do the trick these days. A humorous and frequently-posted feed might have gone viral a few years ago, but the fifteen minutes of fame you’ll gain by this route is lately lasting only five.
Don’t fret, though; Clapperton has the answer. In his estimation, the solution is to use these platforms to their full potential, which largely entails cutting out the middle man. Consider, for a moment, why you post to Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites. It’s because you want to engage your customers. Why? So that they’ll go to your website and you can increase your sales. But why are you issuing this additional call to action? Users must first click-thru before they can start making purchases. Wouldn’t it be simpler if they could just go on your social media pages and buy directly? As it turns out, they can, thanks to social commerce pages.
The majority of Clapperton’s narrative takes you step-by-step through the process of setting up a social commerce page on a platform such as Facebook, including not only how to get through the technical aspects, but how to build a community, keep customers happy, deliver the goods and services that this targeted audience is seeking, and of course, track your results so that you can analyze and tweak your efforts. Basically, you can consider this audio book to be a social media class, one that not only tells you how to use the social platforms that are springing up left and right, but how to turn your efforts into sales. It’s difficult to imagine a business in this day and age that couldn’t benefit from this type of expansion.
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