Think about your personal Facebook profile. This is like your pay to play on Facebook. Everyone has to set one up so that Facebook can gather intel on you. Hahaha, but seriously! In order to set up a business page, you must first set up a personal profile from which you will create the page. Your personal profile is important because even if you have a business page, and even if it is the same name and has the same picture of you on it, people are going to feel more comfortable messaging you as a person vs you as a business. It’s silly I know but psychology….
When it comes to your personal profile you don’t need to worry and schedule out everyday posts, just make sure that you are showing up enough that when someone wants to reach out to you they will get the feeling that you actually spend time there and will get back to them. If I find your profile and see that you haven’t posted in months or your cover photo is snow-covered mountains and its July, do I have a lot of faith that you are even using this account and will actually respond back to me? Probably not!
It’s important to know that sending you a Facebook message is so much easier for people because it seems less committal. They don’t want to text or call because then you will have their cell number, and filling out an online inquiry feels like submitting your personal information to the black market. What people don’t realize is that by connecting on Facebook they are going to allow you to see where they live, how many kids they have, who their favorite football team is, and what they had for dinner. It doesn’t make sense when you think about it, but it is completely true.
You can really learn a lot about people from their social profiles and if you are a clever business person you can leverage that information in a smart, non-creepy way. One of the online entrepreneurs experts and coaches I have followed for years, Gary V, started out doing just that. If you have the chance, look up “The Jay Cutler Story” and hear it straight from Gary but I will paraphrase it here. Gary owns and runs an online store called Wine Library. One day he was killing time on a flight and looking through orders placed. There was an order just over $100, nothing spectacular just a few $10 bottles of Pinot Grigio but he happened to check out the guy who ordered it’s social media. In doing so he found that this guy was a HUGE Jay Cutler fan. On a whim Gary had his team order a signed Jay Cutler Jersey and write him a personal thank you note and send it to him. The story goes on to explain that this act of gratitude later resulted in a $4800 order of high-end wine not from this customer but from his friend that he told the story to. How many people do you think this one person, who received a specialized thank you made possible by leveraging the information available on social media, has rippled out to? Now, of course, I am not saying that you should spend exorbitant amounts of money on gifts to clients and potential clients, but I am saying that you should pay attention to the gold mine of information you can get from Facebook and other social media platforms.
Best practices in any sales situation suggest that you document your conversations with clients and prospective clients so that you can truly build a relationship with them. Every CRM (customer relationship management) program out there has places to note client birthdays, what you talked about in each conversation, and suggests follow-ups based on your sales process. What if you were able to, through Facebook, speed up the getting to know you phase and find things right away that you have in common or better yet how your product or service can better serve them?
