Sell Your Business with Social Networking and Word of "Mouse": The 21st Century Business's "Sales Team"

Use social media to act as your free sales team. Social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin can be huge sales assets to your company, as word of mouth. No sales team can accomplish what referrals and endorsements from your customers can. Nowadays, people research before they buy. And more than ever, people use the internet to conduct this research – more than 70% of consumers, in fact. So, where can prospective buyers find endorsements and reviews about your company? On the social networking sites many of them likely use every day.

Using Social Marketing as Your Sales Team

Product reviews, customer research, customer reviews…these are all posted to websites and read by other potential consumers. If you can learn how to utilize these social networks for your business, getting your business out there in the most positive light where the consumers are looking, you can effectively be sending out a cyber sales team to promote your company.

Think about where your best sales come from. Probably from a happy customer who referred your business right? On Facebook, this can happen every time someone "likes" your business page. Say one person with 1,043 friends on Facebook "likes" your business page. That means all 1,043 of that person's friends will see that they personally endorsed your business. That opens you up to more than a thousand potential customers who may have never heard of your company before.

If you are Tweeting for your company, and someone picks up your Tweet - whether it's a great coupon deal or upcoming sale or arrival of new products - and that person retweets it, that little 140-character-or-less phrase is viewable by the entire Twitterverse. This thereby exposes your company in a major way, in mere seconds, in a way that was essentially unimaginable before social networking sites pervaded the way we live our lives, buy our products and services, and to that end, conduct our business.

Importance of Customer Reviews

Customer reviews and social marketing go hand in hand. Posting customer reviews on Yelp, Citysearch and other directories is one way to get the good work about your product out there. Having testimonials on your website is key as well. But having your own Facebook page and Twitter account is another way in which to easily acquire reviews. "Have you used our service recently? Post on our Facebook page!" "Like us on Facebook!" "Retweet our sale for a special discount." You can utilize your business profile on social networks to engage with your customers, obtain reviews and develop and spread great word of mouth.