Social media is a powerful tool for networking. The ability to meet new people makes it a fantastic way to find new customer and recruiting prospects for your business. However one of the strongest ways to really put the power of social media to work for your business is to use it to enhance face-to-face relationships.
An example from my personal life is when my family joined a new church. The church is rather large, and it was hard to get to know people well in the few minutes during the coffee after the service. Then I was invited to be friends on Facebook with a few members of the church. Suddenly, I had the opportunity to get to know people. There were jokes that started that we could then reference when we saw one another. We shared pictures of our children. In short, we developed a relationship online that made the face-to-face relationship a lot deeper.
Think about this and how it affects your direct selling or network marketing business. When you meet people, either at a party or a one-on-one appointment, chances are you don’t have a lot of time to really get to know them. When people join your team, while you may talk business, you don’t really get a chance to get to know people well, especially if they’re working the business part time. Now imagine connecting with those folks EVERY DAY on Facebook. Imagine commenting on their children’s pictures. Sharing advice and jokes and recipes. Suddenly you’re building a RELATIONSHIP that goes way beyond business.
When people build relationships, they are a lot more comfortable doing business with us. They need to know, like, and trust us first. And once we have a relationship with someone, they’re a lot more likely to order from us again, too, because they remember us and how to order from us. Team members are a lot more willing to trust us, make allowances when we make a mistake, and are willing to be a part of the team.
Online relationship building can be a powerful tool to enhance a face-t0-face direct selling business. We can share more online than we have the opportunity to share in our limited time in person. How are you making the most of this in your business? Would love to read it in the comments below.
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I want to echo your sentiments. Social media is an opportunity to build relationships first. Anything else comes later. Our church actually did a sermon series about building community and urged people at the service to Twitter what was going on. It made the news (Google “Trietsch Memorial Twitter” and you can read several articles.