Using Social Media to Sell Products

Why haven’t the rules of using social media to sell products online been defined?

From what I’ve heard, social media doesn’t sell products – PEOPLE do.  But I do believe that leveraging the many social media platforms and their useful functions can certainly push products much quicker and inexpensively than traditional online marketing techniques can.

I believe there are three key ways one can use social media to sell a product, outlined below.  These are some assumptions, understanding the concepts of social media and its interactive nature and using them to sell a product, so please comment if you have any ideas.

Personality

Social Media is a highly personal platform.  While many companies choose to simply represent their brands online as a different marketing channel, some choose to add personality to the company by allowing employees and high-level executives to actually communicate and interact with customers.  This, in turn, allows the customers to have a more personal aspect in their interaction with the company.

• Applying this to selling a product is simple: form a relationship in a similar way a salesperson might when meeting a person for the first time in real life.  Do not go for that “hard-sell” – leverage the relationship, push for communication, stress the qualities of the product, and encourage feedback.
• Work in relatable stories or a history to bond with customers.  Many salespeople use this technique to appeal to a wide variety of customers, and just because you’re hidden behind a computer screen doesn’t mean you shouldn’t either.  Prove you’re human – try blogging or giving them a link to your personal Twitter.
• Incorporate images of the person who is actually interacting with the customer.  This might include a simple employee profile, or integrating with personal social media platforms. The customer will feel like you are authentic, more comforting than feeling like an entire conglomerate of a company is behind the sale of the product.
• Try to leverage the “halo-effect” – when people have a good opinion about someone or something, it translates to other aspects of them, including the product they may be offering.  Using a personality online with great appeal (which is up to you who you could choose) may translate into better buyer sentiments toward your product.

Authority

In most cultures, people respond to and trust authority.  The sense of authority gives people stronger faith in the product and service they are receiving.  Hearing about a product from a high-level executive, celebrity endorser, or simply a person with some authoritative power will give the customer the sense trust needed to build a relationship and bond with the product.

• In selling a product, the source of the message carries a high value.  Emphasize credibility.  Credible sources can serve as peripheral cues for making a simplified judgement.
• No snake-oil salesman tricks do the job online these days, people are too skeptical.  Use personalities that a person can trust to sell your product, those who seem to want to form a true bond with the customer.  This should be your main goal in using social media, anyway.
• Link to credible sites to backup your product to use as reinforcements from other well-established online sources.  Studies show that consumers are less likely to trust a blogger’s or website’s opinion over their friend’s – which isn’t shocking – but what if the website links to other credible websites or other bloggers that either backup their product or link to information about problems the product solves?  Hearing it from more than one source will make the opinion more popular.

Social Proof

People want what their friends want.  People listen to their friends and other people to make judgements: the trendier the item, the more people want it.  It’s a no-brainer to offer social proof to emphasize your previous customers and hype the responses you’ve gotten in the past (of course, highlighting the positive reactions).

• Allow reviews.  While you may receive negative responses in reaction to some of your products, reviews allow customers to make a judgement based off of others.  Offer incentives to get customers to come back and leave reviews.
• Answer questions and offer solutions in the public space.  Interact with your customers.
• Tie-in to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts – but go beyond simply offering a link.  Get users to login to your site with a commenting application like Disqus – this will prove that users visiting your site are real people, and will offer people more ways to connect than ever before.

I have used some of these strategies in campaigns to sell very unique products that have wide appeal, and modifying as time goes on to see which strategies have the best effect in selling the product online.  There is always a way!