Cold Selling on Social Media

By Adam  |  8 Nov 2015 12:00:00

I'm sure you'll be familiar with the telemarketing strategy known as cold calling (where you call somebody on the telephone who you've never interacted with before and try to persuade them to buy your product) but do you know about cold selling on social media? I'm sure you can figure out that this is where you contact someone over social media (with no prior relationship) and try to sell them your product. In today's blog post I am going to talk about how effective this can be and whether it's worth trying.

First things first, I should say that there isn't necessarily a right or wrong way to do this; the rules of social media marketing are not set in stone and while there are some things which you should never do, you still have a lot of freedom. Anyway, on to social media cold selling: the difference between making a cold call and just sending someone a message or a tweet on social media, is that there is no real human interaction there. With telemarketing, talking to you on the phone might help to assure the customer that they're dealing with a likeable business, but when people receive a message online, they can instantly ignore it.  It’s harder to say no when you’re actually talking to someone. On the other hand, it's much easier and faster to send lots of sales messages to people on social media and while most of them will ignore you, a small percentage is likely to give in. If this is how you want to proceed, it certainly can be effective, but you'll also probably annoy and get blocked by quite a lot of people too.

Personally, I think a better way of using social media for marketing is to simply be nice to people. It's social media and you mustn't forget that you should be social on it. Being nice to people, sharing their work and giving them polite thoughts will encourage them to take a look at your website. You don't need to be overtly salesy, just be pleasant and let everybody associate that kindness with the name of your business. Of course, while sharing all of these positive thoughts with prospects you can also be sharing lots of links back to your website, information on sales and promotions and good pieces of content marketing. That way, people get a good dose of kindness from your business, which will charm them, as well as being shown many reasons to buy from you as well. Ultimately, how you approach social media marketing is down to you and whatever path you decide to take I hope it will be successful!