The marriage between sales and social media is a fairly seamless one. Very much like actual marriage, without active listening and the willingness to compromise, the relationship can be far from happy.

It seems intuitive - social media is a direct reach into your market, so why wouldn’t you utilise its capabilities to make sales? This is harder than it seems though with a few guidelines, can prove quite fruitful for small businesses.

A new catch phrase popping up is “social listening” - engaging with social media outlets to really understand and listen to your customers and their needs and wants. With these insights, you can cater and personalise at every step of the sales process.

With Facebook now appreciating its own value and reflecting that in higher advertising costs, it’s no longer necessarily the obvious and best option for all small businesses. Start by researching what other outlets your customers are using - Instagram, Pinterest, You Tube, LinkedIn and Twitter are great places to start.

Adopt a streamlined strategy, quality over quantity. If your desired customer is not spending time on these sites, then you are wasting time and resources. Basically, don’t sign up for everything - pick and choose and cultivate.

Be aware that lead scraping is not what we mean by social selling. Social selling implies conversion of a lead into a customer and to do so you have to actively engage and become involved in conversations.

Live chats, comment sections and blogs are great ways to initiate conversation.

When cultivating your social media outlets, utilise the 70-20-10 rule. 70% of your page is engaging, relevant content provided by you, 20% is made up of commentary and content generated by others and 10% should be promotional.

Embrace the instantaneous results that social media selling can provide. Time-sensitive offers, click-through deals and “comment/like” and win type promotions have the best results in this here-and-now day and age.

When it comes to selling on social media have no fear, the app’s are here! Consider inSelly, Hashbag, Soldsie, Chirpify and Beetailer, to name a few. Research the options to find one that may work for you.