Selling isn’t bad. Without salesmen, there might not be any marketing going on, or certainly not any buying. But there is a time and a place for every purpose. Facebook is a place for sharing. Not selling.
There are plenty of reasons why you should spend all of your time trying to sell on Facebook, but there’s really just one overriding reason. It’s still considered personal space.
If you’re old enough, you’ll remember those pesky door-to-door salesmen. They showed up at your home to try and sell you a vacuum cleaner. Right when you were busy doing something far more important. Fast forward a few years and telemarketers were the ones who called – just as your family sat down to dinner.
The truth is, many of those salesmen were successful as selling – door-to-door and over the phone. But they sure annoyed a lot of people doing it.
If you spend all your time trying to sell on Facebook, you’ll end up annoying your potential customers. And unlike door-to-door salesmen and telemarketers, you could end up getting kicked off of Facebook. Get enough reports that you are harassing people with marketing messages and you’ll have your account discontinued.
A better way to approach Facebook is to share your expertise with people in a non-threatening way. Make your Facebook messages about things other than yourself.
If you can downplay the hard sell and just interact with your friends and fans to earn their trust, they’ll eventually see you as a viable merchant to buy from. But you’ve got to be patient, not pushy.
Viral marketing seems to be the new buzz word in Internet marketing. Everyone wants their content to go viral. Everyone wants to see their content get distributed across the entire Web, but not everyone understands just how to make that happen.
The bottom line for any kind of marketing is to ensure that your content is before the eyes of the people who will actually use it. That’s half the battle in viral marketing right there.
Viral marketing can often occur spontaneously. When you share something with a friend and that friend shares it with another friend then that friend shares with another. Now imagine that each friend shares your content with five other friends. It’s easy to see how quickly this process can multiply. Just look at how many friends you can reach after going five levels deep:
- You – Share with 5 friends
- Level 2 – Your 5 friends share with 5 friends each = 25 friends
- Level 3 – Each friend’s friend shares with 5 more = 125 friends
- Level 4 – Each Level 3 friend shares with 5 friends = 625 friends
- Level 5 – Each Level 4 friend shares with 5 friends = 3,125 friends
After five levels of sharing, your content has reached 3,906 people including you and your five friends. Now take that one more level and you’ve touched 19,530 people. That’s how viral marketing works.
But what medium should you use to produce that can result? It depends. Where are the people you want to reach? Are they at StumbleUpon or YouTube? Try it there. How about social bookmarking sites like Digg? If that’s where your audience can be found then that’s where you need to submit your content.
The hardest thing about viral marketing is predicting how people will respond. Not everything that looks hot goes hot. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
