In today’s competitive world, having a social media presence is vital to your brand. It’s simply where the people are, where they’re interacting and building relationships with businesses and other people, so you’re going to be left behind if you don’t establish a good presence there.
As a direct seller, you really need to take advantage of what’s at hand to get your personal brand out there and get new leads, as well as repeat customers. Though going door-to-door and hosting a party still works well in getting those sales, social media has made it much easier for you to reach out to hundreds of people from the comfort of your own home.
You see, social media has this incredibly viral effect online. What you share with your friends and followers can ultimately spread across their first, second, and even third degree friends, which you can imagine is just massive. Of course, it’s important that you know how to properly manage your social media accounts. When used effectively, social media can really help you foster those important relationships and potentially generate you new leads and prospects.
The question is, which social networking sites should you build a presence on? With regards to sheer number of users, Facebook and Twitter definitely top the list, so it’s quite important to your personal brand to make sure you have a profile up on those two sites and maintain them with posts and updates. You also want to make sure that you interact with your audience there with comments, reposts, re-tweets, and "likes."
There is one social site that has become a serious contender with its excellent platform, and it has significantly grown since it recently opened its doors to the public. Yes, Google+ is finally open to anyone who wants to sign up and create an account – no more need for an invitation to get in.
And in addition to finally opening its doors to everyone, it has rolled out some nifty new features that many people are starting to rave about. It seems Google really has a lot up its sleeve – though the current features that Google+ has are already pretty amazing, it seems there are a lot more features to come that could possibly make it the best social networking site out there.
And at the back of it remains the fact that Google continues to be the number one search engine, so your profile on Google+ definitely gives you an edge in the Google Search Engine rankings.
So how do you use this to your advantage? As a direct seller, should you really jump on the bandwagon and start establishing a presence on Google+?
The answer to this is a resounding "yes." It’s been reported that Google+ already has 50 million users right now, and it continues to grow every day. Now, if you want to ignore those millions of users, then it’s all fine and good, but why should you, if it can possibly help your personal branding campaign?
What’s great about Google+ is the fact that it offers some excellent personal branding tools that can help you get relevant and timely content out there to your audience. With Circles, for example, you don’t have to blast out information to all of your followers – you can simply choose whom you want to target and then post specific content for their eyes only – it’s a good way to ensure that your updates are received by those who will consider it relevant to their lives, not just random people who don’t really care.
Google+ has also improved upon its Hangouts feature, which gives you the ability to video chat with up to ten people. You can use it to have a video conference or simply connect in a more personal way with your customers.
It has been recently revealed that Google+ plans to roll out a couple more features in the future. From expanded photo features to a “Google Experts” kind of community, Google is certainly pushing social media to its limits, which people are really excited about.
If you think you already have a good social media presence on other sites and don’t really want to manage another one, then it’s probably okay if you wait a bit before joining Google+. Since it’s still relatively new, there’s still a lot of speculation as to whether or not it’s really going to succeed and be able to compete with the giants that Facebook and Twitter have become.
But if you can manage it, it may not be a bad idea to start establishing a presence there. Think of it this way – you’ll become one of its veterans, and when other direct sellers finally take notice and start getting their pages up, you can proudly proclaim that you already have a solid presence that has probably helped you foster better relationships and generate new leads.