Build your brand on Facebook. Make sales with Twitter. Earn better page rankings with Google+. Connect with shoppers on Pinterest. Tell your story on Tumblr. Close quicker with Instagram. Are you doing all you can to increase your online sales opportunities?
Or are you doing all you should do to increase your sales online?
Pew Internet recently reported that nearly three-quarters of adults use social networking sites. Which begs two questions:
- Are we over-saturated? and
- Is this accurate?
Are You Losing Business Online?
Surprisingly, the second question is easier to answer than the first. See, statistics don’t lie but they are widely misunderstood. We don’t doubt that 72 percent of American adults who were asked said that they are using social networking sites. It’s even a pretty safe assumption that 28 percent of American adults who were asked said that they don’t use social networking sites. But what if the sample was skewed? Or, how was the sample skewed? Because inevitably, samples are skewed.
We’ll leave that for the data-scrubbers to debate, and go back to the first question: Are we overwrought, screen-addicted, convenience-loving, social media-loving American Adults now over-saturated, too?
It will take social psychologists a few months, at least, to sort that out. In the meantime, those of us who spend our days generating online sales will have to move on without conclusive data. (Please don’t mention this to Nate Silver.)
Until someone in social media marketing has All The Answers, we’re going to rely on common sense and a fair dose of self-confidence, plus several decades of business experience, to keep generating sales using every social media platform that makes sense for our clients – over-saturated or not.
Social Media Leads to Sales and Burnout
The easy answer to both questions is “yes.” Individual consumers struggle daily to deal with the onslaught, as do business owners and their sales and marketing departments. How to cope? Basically, you can –
- Do more! More! More, all the time!
- Fuggedaboutit.
- Figure out what works for you, and do it the best you possibly can.
We think #3 is the right, common sense approach. While we can offer clients a comprehensive social media program, we rarely recommend the do more-more-more method. What we generally suggest instead is to develop a strong presence using two, three, or four social media vehicles rather than committing to a dozen (or even a half-dozen). Why? Time and money don’t grow on trees, and we’d prefer our clients take the common sense approach, rather than spread themselves (and their marketing budgets) too thin.
Why this works: as your sales grow, so will your budget. In fact, our JointSourcing model is built on that principle.
Want to use common sense to grow sales? We’re with you. Contact us if you’re sold on that approach, too.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Are you doing all you can to increase your online sales opportunities? Or are you doing all you should do to increase your sales online? Many of our clients are surprised that we don’t advocate creating a social media presence on every available vehicle.