How to Market with Social Media Without Spamming? Part II

Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 10:30 AM

In the previous post we discussed what spam is and what it looks like. Today, let’s discuss some of the strategies you can use to market without spamming.

In order to be able to implement this strategy I’m going to share with you, it’s imperative to understand few elements. (I know I keep repeating these, but I am doing it with an intention it will become a second nature to you to feel and think this way about social media.)

Social media is not a place to sell
Create relationships first and then sell
Offer freely things of value, without expecting or asking for anything in return
Truly care about people you meet there

If you can keep this mindset while on social media platforms, I promise, you will have a lot greater success.

#1 strategy to combating this issue of spamming is implementing the permission marketing.

Permission marketing is marketing to a group of people who have already given you a permission to market.

Permission marketing is a privilege you earn after you have practiced the important elements I described above. It’s based on mutual agreement of what they expect to receive and what they will receive. It’s not as much important what type of content you will send them, educational, salesy, news…what is important is that they have agreed to receive a particular type of content and then you send them exactly that.

Any tomato out there can get someone’s email and add it to their list, but getting other peoples permission to be added to the list is a whole different ballgame. I get about 10-20 emails a day alone from people who have manually added me to their list. If I had any say so, I would have never said yes. So if that’s the case, how much good is going to be for them to have a list of people who don’t want to hear from them???? Or to post on someone’s Facebook or Twitter profile how great their product is and such if all people will do in return is roll their eyes, ignore it, or delete it.

It won’t. It’s a huge waist of their time and efforts.

Now, some argue that the “numbers game” kicks in, and I’m here to promise you, if you’d do it right, your numbers will be 10s and 100s of times greater using permission marketing rather then spamming – hands down.

If your audience gives your permission to send them stuff, they are the ones who requested your marketing pieces they must have some sincere interest in learning more about what you do and therefore, more inclined to open and read your emails.

True permission marketing, as Seth Godin would say (Seth actually coined that term) is: “Real permission works like this: if you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went.”

Now that my friends, is a list of qualified, sold-on-you prospects. And when you have a list of those, you will not have a problem with spamming – ever again.