Selling when opportunity arises

Conventional thinking says that social media is designed for long-term
engagement, for marketing and branding rather than for sales. However,
a few obvious selling opportunities exist, particularly for business-toconsumer
(B2C) companies, that won’t offend followers:

✦ Sell CDs and event tickets. Services such as MySpace cater to music
and entertainment and are considered appropriate places.
✦ Include a link to your store on social shopping services. Recommend
products — particularly apparel, jewelry, beauty, and decor — as
Stylehive does.
✦ Offer promotional codes or special offers to followers. Offering them
on particular networks encourages your followers to visit your site to
make a purchase. You can even announce sales or events.

✦ Place links to online or third-party stores on your profile pages on various
services. You can rarely sell directly from a social media service,
but some permit you to place widgets that visually showcase your products
and links to your online store, PayPal, or the equivalent to conclude
a transaction.
✦ Include a sign-up option for your e-newsletter. It offers a bridge to
sales.

The chart in Figure 1-8 shows a 2010 HubSpot survey of the percentage of
companies that succeeded in acquiring a customer by way of a specific
social media channel. The survey encompassed both B2B companies on the
left of each pairing and B2C companies on the right. It shows that many businesses
that make the effort succeed in closing sales that were initiated in a
social media channel.

Include sales offers within a stream of information and news to avoid turning
your social media site into a series of never-ending advertisements.
Throughout this book, you read about other businesses that have found
unique ways to sell socially.