Social networking can be a great tool. It can accelerate the number of contacts we have and it can expose our products and our ideas to a large audience. What it does not do as well as face communication is sell and close. Put another way, social networking really is not “selling,” in its purest sense, it is marketing, and marketing has never replaced selling in any medium, including on the web.
The reason I am bringing this up is because we tend to fall in love with our websites, our LinkedIn profiles and our Google rankings. And while they are all really, really important in this new age of marketing and promotion, believing that marketing alone will generate sales can be a false hope. Often it is the opening gambit in the sales cycle, but the close is dependent upon the personal interaction and energy that only a strong salesperson can generate.
So go ahead and Tweet away . . . we do . . . but do remember that at some point you probably need to go back to the selling basics to close business. Because pretty much everybody out there is in the social media game now, so it will come down to, as it always has, the personal rapport and product differentiation that you can create, PERSONALLY.
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