It seems like every blog post you read is about branding you; setting up a blog; start a social media campaign; start tweeting and so forth. To say information overload is an understatement, even for seasoned internet marketers. The biggest challenge is where to invest the bulk of your time without being sucked into a vacuum. And how to get the most from social media marketing for your direct sales business opportunity.

This blog post was inspired by Lynn Terry’s Take-Aways from Ustream Disaster  which chronicled her recent experiment with Ustream inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It!

Another interesting post is from Dan Schwabel for Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing: Stop Wasting Time with Social Media. Dan is recognized as “personal branding guru” by The New York Times. Dan writes, “I used to spend two hours a day on Twitter, yet it didn’t result in enough opportunities to prove its marketing value.”

Choosing an online medium
There are so many online mediums to choose from and some might not be the best medium to reach and convert your target market. Setting up a Twitter account is easy and getting thousands of followers fast is easy too with a paid service (which I don’t recommend!). But making real connections with people on Twitter is not always easy to do.

Even though Facebook has over 400 million users, it seems Facebook offers an incredible opportunity to tap into this vast network of “friends” and thousands of Like/Fan pages that you can join and participate in but is it really translating into real business?

Personally, I rarely pay attention to the “become a fan” notices and invites and miss 99% of the daily feeds. Not that it’s unimportant to me but it’s not the main medium for my business.

Which brings up Twitter. Although Marketing Direct Sales gets a good amount of traffic from Twitter and I’ve met new friends and added team members to my business, the percentage is tiny but the friendship is valuable.  As Paul Gillin says in Secrets of Social Media only about 1% of your online contacts will engage or add any real value to your business.

And as Dan says in the above blog post, most Facebook and Twitter users are already following too many people to take notice. More reasons for you to solidify the relationships that you’ve already built through these mediums and enhance those relationships on a personal level. These are your true followers, friends and fans that add value to your bottom line.

Setting up benchmarks
This is not to say you shouldn’t add social media to your online marketing mix but you need to set up benchmarks to track the return on your investment. The end goal is more than just socializing on social media for the plain fun of it (unless that’s your goal).

If blogging is your medium, treat it like a business which means you should set up marketing strategies and track your progress. If it’s Twitter, set up a strategic marketing plan.

Whatever marketing strategies you’re using as a medium to build your direct sales opportunity, set up benchmarks and re-evaluate on a regular basis. I don’t get hung up on Google Analytics, number of followers or friends, but rather the quality of the interactions.

At the end of the week, if you’re hitting the number of leads captured through your marketing efforts or sold x-number of products and opportunities shared-  whatever the benchmarks you’ve set, expand on those marketing efforts and drop the ones that aren’t working for you.

Business shouldn’t be a zero-sum game as in sports where someone or a team has to lose (yeah, sad about the Lakers’ lost last night!). Instead, reach out to your fellow direct sales consultants that need help. Return the kindness from someone else’s help and weed out the ones that approach business as a zero-sum game.

In business, you benefit by adding more value to someone else’s lives. You help others and they in turn help you. Everybody wins.

How are you using social media for marketing your direct sales business opportunity?

‘til next time,

Janette

p.s. If you would like my new FREE guide: How to Turn Your Passion into a Blog and Profit, leave your email below. It’ll be available soon . Kindly share this post with your network of pals … much thanks!!

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