Special thanks to Something Creative, Inc. for this information!!
Originally posted at http://mikeyp.us/ldosh on Facebook.
Preface: If you were to execute the strategies discussed in this post, you could significantly reduce the amount of time spent on each social networking site. But remember that the social media space is built on engagement and interaction. If you aren’t engaging with your community at least once in a while, your community may not be very receptive to your pitch if/when a new sales opportunity is staring you in the face.
Not Enough Hours in a Day
If you’ve been dabbling with social media for a while, you understand the time-consuming nature of the space. For many companies, their commitment to social media has forced them to either add dedicated staff or outsource the effort. But we, as small businesses, don’t typically have the resources to do either of those, so we’re relegated to spending the time ourselves, or we just don’t.
The main thing we all need to realize is that your friends/followers/connections are constantly throwing out sales opportunities. In fact, I’d argue that most status updates or tweets are sales opportunities for someone or some company. Here’s a Twitter screen shot I just pulled straight from my stream to help explain my point (in red)…
Bottom line, sales opportunities are there for those who are listening. But listening takes time and most of us can’t afford to sit there and wait for something relevant to appear. But we’re in luck… There are ways in which we can leverage the built-in technology of these social sites to do the listening for us and deliver those opportunities to our front door.
A Quick Social Media Strategy Lesson
One of the key exercises that I walk businesses through in my social media strategy sessions is to figure out which words or phrases your customers would use in conversation that relate to your product or service. For instance, a chiropractor may want to listen for such phrases as “my back hurts” or “my back is killing me”. I call these “money words” and it’s important to identify your money words/phrases before diving blindly into your social ponds. You can then use these terms within your social media profiles and as filtering mechanisms when working with RSS feeds provided by social networking sites.
What are RSS Feeds?
RSS is the mechanism by which websites make their content available for syndication. In a recent post, I described RSS as the DVR of the web. So then an RSS feed is what makes a website “DVR-enabled”. For example, a blog comes with an RSS feed, which allows people to subscribe and pull the blog’s content into their RSS reader (think DVR menu).
Social networking sites also provide RSS feeds that can be pulled into your RSS reader. Such content as Facebook status updates and Twitter keyword searches can be delivered directly to your reader for review whenever you get around to it. BUT, upon doing this, you’ll notice a lot of noise and irrelevant junk. This is were your “money filters” come into play.
Mine Facebook for Sales Opportunities
Let’s say you have roughly 200 “friends” on Facebook, including old high school and college friends, family, former coworkers and clients. Facebook’s status update functionality (“What’s on your mind?”) gives you a steady smorgasbord of content on your Facebook homepage. If you wanted to, you could pull that RSS feed into your RSS reader and get every update from your Facebook friends, but that would be like your DVR recording hundreds of TV shows everyday. Instead, we want to filter those status updates to deliver only the updates that might be sales opportunities for you.
So how do we find that RSS feed? Well up until a few months ago, it was a simple link on your “Friends” page. But for some reason, Facebook removed this link forcing the tech community to figure out work arounds. So put on your “hacker” hat and let’s go hack into Facebook (its actually simpler than it sounds).
Here’s how to pull and filter your Facebook friends’ status RSS feed:
- Log in to Facebook, type “notes” into the search box (upper right) and click the Notes drop down button.
- On the Notes page, look at the bottom of the right column for “Subscribe to these Notes”. Click the “My Friends’ Notes” link with the little blue RSS icon.
- Your screen should change into a standard RSS subscription page with “(YOUR NAME)’s Friends’ Facebook Notes” as the title.
- In the address bar, you should see a URL that looks like this: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/friends_notes.php?id=XXXXXXXXX&key=XXXXXXXXXX&format=rss20
- In the URL, change “friends_notes.php” to “friends_status.php” and hit enter.
- You now should see the RSS subscription page titled “(YOUR NAME)’s Friends’ Facebook Status Updates”.
- Go back up to the address bar and copy the URL.
- Now go to www.feedrinse.com, create an account, then start the process by importing (pasting) your RSS feed in the designated field.
- Once imported, create a few filters by typing in your money words/phrases.
- With your filters set, export your “rinsed” RSS feed and plug it into your favorite RSS reader (Google Reader is my fav).
You now should see only your Facebook friends’ status updates that include your money terms. Quick Tip: If you have an iGoogle customized homepage, you can add a Google Reader “gadget” to your page, which will give you a quick reference to the RSS feeds to which you’ve subscribed.
Mining Twitter
Fortunately, Twitter makes things a lot easier. Their advanced search functionality allows you to do searches for each of your money terms and returns tweets that match your query. When I’ve shown this function to people who just “don’t get Twitter”, this is typically when the light bulb turns on. If your search results seem to be relevant sales opportunities, then you can pull the RSS feeds of those search queries into your RSS reader. Here’s how:
- Go to http://search.twitter.com/advanced
- Type in one of your money words/phrases. Also note that you have the ability to narrow your search with many other filtering tools on that page. One in particular is the “places” filter. If your market is local, you might want to plug in a zip code or city, which will then only pull tweets from people in that geographic area.
- On the search results page, click the “Feed for this query” in the upper right.
- Copy the feed URL in the address bar and plug that into your RSS reader.
- Then go back to Twitter search and plug in your next term. Rinse and repeat.
Pro Tip: For you tech-savvy individuals with many networks, products and services, you might want to consider Yahoo Pipes for more robust consolidation and filtering tools.
The Social Sales Approach – the Hard Sell or the Soft Touch?
If you’ve managed to get through this marathon of a post, you should now have potential sales opportunities sitting there staring at you. Time to go in for the hard sell? Absolutely not. One key thing you HAVE TO REMEMBER is that these people are not expressing their needs or desires with the intent of being sold to. Quite the contrary. They don’t want to be sold to and more likely are just venting, making small talk or trying to spark conversation.
But if you are strategic in your approach, you can start to plant a seed with a well-timed, soft touch that could come in many forms. It could be as simple as starting to follow them on Twitter and having a helpful article positioned as your latest tweet. Or you might post a genuine comment on one of their recent status updates or family photos. Often times these timely tidbits are the soft touches that get you on their radar or prompt them to click on your profile to find out what you do professionally.
Bottom line…When you genuinely engage with prospects and become a valuable resource for them, you’ll have a much better chance of capitalizing on those sales opportunities, a.k.a. being at the right place at the right time.
Thanks for reading this post. If you would like help setting up your social profiles, RSS filtering mechanisms or your social media strategy in general, we’re here to help.
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