A lot of your salespeople might not be into social media. The more experienced “old school” sellers simply might not have understood the value of social media in business. The might think that social media equals Facebook and minute-by-minute updates of someone’s mundane personal life. Or they might not be technology-savvy enough to master all the various tools and services involved in using social media effectively.
To help social challenged sales executives and salespeople I gathered a short list of the most important social media vocabulary as it relates to sellers.
Here’s the minimum what you should know about social media in the sales profession:
Blog – a website, maintained by an individual, group or company, with commentary, descriptions of events, or other media such as graphics or video. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. A lot of companies have started blogging in the recent years to gain marketing benefits.
Facebook – is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Companies can set up Fan Pages and gather Fans around their brand.
Following means getting regular updates e.g. from a person, group, discussion or company in social media. Most social media services provide some sort of “Follow” button or similar way of getting updates.
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site mainly used for professional networking. A user’s profile is essentially an extended CV. One purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people with whom they have some level of relationship, called Connections. The site also has company home pages and numerous other useful networking features.
RSS Feed (Really Simple Syndication) makes it easy to publish, collect, and keep track of multiple sources of many types of content. When we refers to subscribing to a blog it most often means subscribing to an RSS feed of the blog.
RSS reader is a piece of software that checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds. RSS allows users to avoid manually inspecting all of the websites they are interested in, and instead subscribe to websites such that all new content is pushed onto their browsers when it becomes available.
Social Networking Sites – focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact Social networking websites are being used regularly by hundreds of millions of people. Some of the most popular social networking sites include Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Subscribing (usually to a blog or news feed) refers to getting either an RSS feed or regular email updates of the subscribed content. The usual way is to subscribe to a blog’s articles in a way that you don’t have to go checking the blog page .for new articles. Instead, the new articles are pushed to you either in your RSS reader or email inbox.
Twitter - Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). A lot of companies have Twitter accounts and tweet about various things.
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