How To Correctly Use Social Media To Grow Your Business

Social Media (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, MySpace) can be a fantastic way to grow your personal brand and your business. There are literally dozens of big name social networking sites out there with thousands, if not millions, of users all connected together by a single website. Within those groups of users you will find many people in your target audience that will perhaps want to join you in your business opportunity. But, there is a correct way and a wrong way to go about growing your business via social media.

First of all, you should never try to blatantly pitch your opportunities to every “friend” you connect to on these sites. This is the wrong way to social network as you will become a pariah in your network if you become that guy that won’t shut up about the “best business opportunity he’s ever seen”. This approach will have the opposite effect you are looking to achieve. Most people are on these social media sites to have a good time and catch up with friends, and not to hear about the next best business opportunity that just can’t be passed up.

Perry Belcher is widely considered the king of social media amongst internet marketers. He has used social media as a tool to get hundreds of thousands of people into his sales funnel in order to sell many different products and services, and he has made a LOT of money doing it. His approach to using social media to grow his business is by treating social media sites just like a party. You go to these sites to have a good time, and well…party! You interact with people and comment on their photos and their news feeds and then when you start connecting to people that you think would be a good fit for your business or might be interested in your retail service or product, you invite them to your “house” for a party. What he means by your house, is your personal blog site that you’ve set up with some different things you have going on in both your social life and professional life. Here is where you can have links to your business opportunities and retail services or products. Also, you always want to think about adding value to the people you bring to your blog, so offer free things like ebooks or reports that will help them get what they want. They will be multiple times more receptive to your opportunities if they have gotten to know you a little bit and established a relationship foundation first via the social media sites when they come to your blog than if you hit them over the head with your pitch the moment you meet them.

As a real life example of the wrong way to promote your opportunity via social media, I’d like to give you an example from my experience. I received a friend invite and a private message from an individual on Facebook the other day. This person had found me via the Kyani (my primary business opportunity) user group I am a member of within Facebook. His private message to me went something like this: “Hi there, I see you are in the Kyani user group. Did you know hundreds of distributors are leaving Kyani and joining XYZ company? Come take a look at www.username.xyzcompany.com!!!!!

When I read this message, the first thing that crossed my mind was, who the heck is this guy and why would I EVER want to connect with him here on Facebook? If I do, he’s just going to be hitting me over the head every single day as to why his company is so much better than Kyani. I don’t have time or the patience to deal with that, so I ignored him. I can say with almost complete certainty that every single person in our Kyani group that he sent the friend invite and message to did the same exact thing. Do you see how this is the absolute wrong way to use social media to grow your business?

Now, if he would have said that he’d like to be my friend because I was in the Kyani group and left it at that, I would have certainly accepted his invitation to be friends. From there, he could have interacted within the Kyani group, started asking questions, talked about product comparisons, etc., and who knows maybe he would have had some within our group take a serious look at him as a leader, and look further into his products and opportunity in comparison to Kyani. The difference here is all in the approach.