Should Salespeople be Using their Personal Social Accounts for Business?

There is little doubt that social media has an impact on sales. Companies use it every day to generate leads, increase branding, and improve public perceptions. As a marketing tool at the company level, few would contest the potential. What about at the salesperson level?

That was the question that we tried to answer this week during a seminar in Connecticut. We spoke to 80 sales people and another 30 managers at a dealer group to show them the ins and outs of utilizing social media on the personal level. The group is doing well applying social media principals to their company pages, but can individual sales people utilize sites like Facebook to improve their personal sales?

As with everything, there are pros and cons.

If there’s one thing that social media is great for that companies rarely apply it to, it’s customer service. The goal of keeping customers happy while increasing repeat and referral business is a strength of the social web. For individuals, here are the ways that it can help.

Instant Gratification: When someone buys a car, they’re normally in a good mood. They have stepped up into something that they’re probably pretty proud of and sharing it with friends and family is inevitable. A salesperson who has built a personal relationship during the sales process can easily ask someone to be their friend on Facebook, to share a picture shot on an iPhone of them in front of their new car, and to mention them by name in the post. The chances of getting a referral quickly has never been easier.Simple Follow Up: Checking in on people to see how their product is doing for them is a challenge today. People don’t always answer their phones and they answer emails even less frequently. Texting, Facebook, and Twitter have become, for many, the easiest way to get a response. When finding out if someone has gotten their first free oil change, taken their CSI survey, or told their friends about you, social media is the easiest venue.Aggressively Non-Aggressive: After the sale is done, some people do not like being hounded by their salesperson. Social media is a place that can be non-confrontational, allowing sales people to become actual friends with their customers, sharing experiences and commenting on each others’ travails. It’s easier to stir up repeat and referral business a month after you’ve wished someone a happy birthday or congratulated them on getting a new job than when hounding them on phone or email month in, month out.

There aren’t just cons. There are flat-out risks for some. Our personal lives and business lives are not intended to be intertwined. In social media, the lines are more difficult to define when separating the two.

The Personal Faux Pas: Just because a salesperson is professional and polite at work doesn’t mean they don’t get wild and crazy outside of work. What happens on Facebook often stays on Facebook and can turn people off even if the sales process itself was flawless.Added Work: With anything that can drive business, work must be put in. Some sales people do not have the time to attend to their regular customers and still prospect or follow up through social media.The Addiction Potential: Getting into social media for business purposes can lead people to using social media for personal reasons. Sheer exposure to the “fun side” of social media can turn a productivity win into a major failure if the exposure turns into counter-productivity.

Both of these lists are incomplete. There are much more pros and cons to using social media on an individual level in sales. Are there others that you can think of that I missed?

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What should be the color palette of the site?

Webmasters are a lot of undue attention to the site, worrying about things like meta tags, keyword density (actually a myth), article titles. But all sidelined when it comes to links.

Most practitioners SEOsnikov spend their days studying communications and by obsessing over build referential mass. But many site owners completely ignore links or maximum pay them little attention. The reason for this is pretty obvious: If the site itself, its content, design, visitors can "touch", references a few vague notion that look without special tools.

Firstly, do not use the guglovskij operator link: checking links. He is highly imprecise.

First where can I see beklinki is Google Webmaster Tools and Google Webmaster

Both tools provide a huge amount of information that Google and Yandex know about this site. Although the accuracy and reliability of the information provided by there often called into question, it's an invaluable tool for Web masters.

There are two basic indicators, as follows: number of links on the site and the number of domainsthat refer to the site. Both of these pieces of information are available in Google and Yandex:

The number of links that will almost always be higher than the number of domains, and will often be more than one link from a site that links to yours. Two links are better than one, but two references from two different domains, even better.

But Google only shows the domains that most frequently cite the pages of your site, and Yandex – "approximately", which is not enough.

For a long time, and now, many have Yahoo’s Site Explorer, but unfortunately will soon end, Yahoo closes freebie tools.

Among other services, you can select SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO’s Site Explorer.

If you check out the site using these services, the results will differ from those in Yandex and Google webmasters panels, and among themselves.

All spiders crawl services over the network, but they all work in different ways, and therefore find different links. Collecting references, they then cleaning lists, removing those they think are spam or unimportant. Unfortunately, they all have different criteria for the adoption of those decisions.

Although most complex analytics for those services requiring payment, basic information on beklinkah is available free of charge.

Now there are four sets (SEOmoz, Majestic, Google, Yandex) of two numbers (all backlinks and reference domains) for the site, and most likely, they differ from each other. Most importantly, we need to understand that none of them is "correct". Even Yahoo did not give details.

It is important to track these data in perspective: how they are changing, i.e. whether the growing number of backlinks or not. Need to track changes, for example lead plate, where every month to record the figures and observe the trend of the reference mass of the site.

Posted on August 6, 2011 liked the article? leave your comment and subscribe to rss feeds.
And yet, you can receive updates directly to your email box:
Direct link to the article "how to check backlinks to the site:

Questions that you should know the answer

Webmasters are a lot of undue attention to the site, worrying about things like meta tags, keyword density (actually a myth), article titles. But all sidelined when it comes to links.

Most practitioners SEOsnikov spend their days studying communications and by obsessing over build referential mass. But many site owners completely ignore links or maximum pay them little attention. The reason for this is pretty obvious: If the site itself, its content, design, visitors can "touch", references a few vague notion that look without special tools.

Firstly, do not use the guglovskij operator link: checking links. He is highly imprecise.

First where can I see beklinki is Google Webmaster Tools and Google Webmaster

Both tools provide a huge amount of information that Google and Yandex know about this site. Although the accuracy and reliability of the information provided by there often called into question, it's an invaluable tool for Web masters.

There are two basic indicators, as follows: number of links on the site and the number of domainsthat refer to the site. Both of these pieces of information are available in Google and Yandex:

The number of links that will almost always be higher than the number of domains, and will often be more than one link from a site that links to yours. Two links are better than one, but two references from two different domains, even better.

But Google only shows the domains that most frequently cite the pages of your site, and Yandex – "approximately", which is not enough.

For a long time, and now, many have Yahoo’s Site Explorer, but unfortunately will soon end, Yahoo closes freebie tools.

Among other services, you can select SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO’s Site Explorer.

If you check out the site using these services, the results will differ from those in Yandex and Google webmasters panels, and among themselves.

All spiders crawl services over the network, but they all work in different ways, and therefore find different links. Collecting references, they then cleaning lists, removing those they think are spam or unimportant. Unfortunately, they all have different criteria for the adoption of those decisions.

Although most complex analytics for those services requiring payment, basic information on beklinkah is available free of charge.

Now there are four sets (SEOmoz, Majestic, Google, Yandex) of two numbers (all backlinks and reference domains) for the site, and most likely, they differ from each other. Most importantly, we need to understand that none of them is "correct". Even Yahoo did not give details.

It is important to track these data in perspective: how they are changing, i.e. whether the growing number of backlinks or not. Need to track changes, for example lead plate, where every month to record the figures and observe the trend of the reference mass of the site.

Posted on August 6, 2011 liked the article? leave your comment and subscribe to rss feeds.
And yet, you can receive updates directly to your email box:
Direct link to the article "how to check backlinks to the site: