Social media can generate sales if you work according to the 80/20 rule. Well, it’s very simple, let’s assume that you have an active username in any of the social networking sites (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) so here you would have to sprinkle 80% of content that add value, entertain and inform people, while the 20% must corresponds to your sales messages.

The 80% content will help you in branding yourself and will be instrumental in surfacing your domain’s expertise to the likeminded people. Once you have proved your credentials, chances become high that people will respond to your 20% messages that were saturated with the sales pitch.

Don’t thrust yourself

After all, people will be more comfortable in buying things from the one they trust and of course have developed rapport with the passage of time. Don’t ever try to enter into social networking site and start selling your stuff by shedding links here and there; it is not a tool for streaming sales. This ‘strategy’ will land you no-where rather you’d be flagged as a spammer.

Don’t push yourself onto them, how would you feel if others start pestering you by selling their stuff again and again, won’t it be too annoying? Now think the same for the buyers as well. They are coming over to the networking site to exchange ideas or related stuff, they are not there to buy things remember that!

Networking requires patience and commitment

Nevertheless networking does not bear fruit within one go, it takes time so you have to have patience and of course commitment to augment your network. Make sure that your graph of networking does not go down. Read the updates within your network and reply them on regular basis. Let the people within your network feel that someone is hearing them.

Don’t forget networks offer a mechanism to connect, help companies leverage existing relationships and then comes the sales part.

Think about it!

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