Social media is for cat videos and being jealous of those amazing vacations your friends are taking, right? Well, maybe if you’re not a business owner, but, you ARE a business owner. That means that social media is a totally different animal to tame.

Social media is a channel you can use to connect and interact with your audience. You can use it to build your authority and credibility and as a place to post valuable content and information for your followers. Ultimately, it’s where you can find and close new clients for your business at an incredible speed. With social media, it’s possible to take a prospect from a completely cold lead to a signed-up client in under 24 hours. That’s not something you see with cold calling, cold email, or physical networking events.

Effective use of social media is an easy, direct, and repeatable process that will allow you to make however much money you need and as fast as you need it.

Facebook and LinkedIn are without a doubt two of the most powerful social media platforms when it comes to getting clients and connecting with your audience. Facebook alone has over 2.7 billion users! This part examines these two platforms and details which one might be most effective for reaching your target audience.

Let’s start with Facebook. It’s the biggest and most widespread social media network in the world. Facebook is extremely user-friendly and you have a much more diverse range of users than LinkedIn. Facebook is the most powerful advertising platform right now.

Facebook groups are some of the most powerful tools that you can use to get in front of your audience. There's a Facebook group for just about anything you can imagine: basket weaving, golf, fancy cars, and marketing, just to name a few. The trick is to get inside of these groups and become known as a credible expert in your field. You can do this by posting in these groups or by commenting on the posts of others. The goal is to be so helpful that anytime someone in these groups needs your types of services, they think of you first.

The real caveat with Facebook is that you have to be able to differentiate between people that would be great clients and bystanders that either don't have the means or the desire to hire you for your services. On top of that, there’s a lot of content being posted to Facebook. Getting in front of people can be a little bit trickier than on LinkedIn.

Overall, though, Facebook is an immensely powerful platform for prospecting. Between Facebook and LinkedIn, it may work better for you to try prospecting on Facebook first. It’s simpler and a lot more straightforward. Plus, people are much more likely to respond to you on Facebook.

LinkedIn is a social media platform that was designed for business professionals. The tone and overall feeling of LinkedIn is much different than on Facebook. You won’t find a lot of birthday party pics or drama on LinkedIn. Almost all of the content you see will be about business and different aspects of business, like sales, marketing, product launches, and similar topics. LinkedIn used to be a place where you create a resume, apply for a job here or there, and then forget all about it. But it’s gone through dramatic overhauls since then, and while you can still apply for tons of jobs on the platform, it’s now much more of a professional and business-centered networking platform.

LinkedIn has a ton of tools at your disposal and some interesting quirks that you’ll need to understand before you can use the platform as your client-getting workhorse:

Free versus paid. There is a free version of LinkedIn and then there are paid subscription models that allow you more access to the tools of the platform

• With the free version, you are limited to only being able to message people that you have connected with (like a friend request on Facebook) and you cannot message them until they have accepted your request.
• The other major thing that is limited is your searching ability. You are only allowed 30 searches per month from the search bar.
• For the purpose of prospecting, Sales Navigator would be the most helpful upgrade on LinkedIn.  Check the site for cost.

However, if you’re just starting out or haven't broken into the multiple 6-figure range, then the free version of LinkedIn should be more than enough.

Groups. Just like Facebook, LinkedIn has plenty of groups that can be used to find a pool of ideal clients. Groups can be extremely useful, but leveraging inbound marketing with LinkedIn is especially effective. LinkedIn makes revenue from running ads in the news feeds, so it wants to keep its users on the news feeds as much as possible.

• This is why LinkedIn is a very rewarding platform to post all of your content on.
• Unlike Facebook, you can actually post full articles and blogs onto the LinkedIn platform. Long-form content like this can increase your credibility if it is relevant and helpful to your ideal clients.
• Shelf life of posts. In addition to the long-form content, your posts will have a longer “shelf life,” meaning that your posts will stay visible for a longer period of time than they would on Facebook.

There’s a ton to say about these two social media giants, but this should give you a great head start and get you thinking about which social media platform might work best for you. At the end of the day, it may benefit you to give both of them a genuine effort and see which one you’re more comfortable with and which one brings in more results for your business.

The Runner-Ups

While Facebook and LinkedIn are generally the best for getting new clients, there are some other social media platforms that you might wish to consider using for marketing purposes. Instagram and Twitter are also popular:

• Instagram. Instagram is probably the third most popular social media platform for acquiring new clients. That's because it’s super easy to search for prospects based on what they love and their pain points.
• Twitter. Some people use Twitter to attract clients. However, its restrictive word count can make it more difficult to use for marketing.

Social media is a great medium to use for getting clients, but what about all of the other methods you’ve probably heard about? Truth be told, they all have their merits and their downfalls. Let's go over these methods and you’ll probably agree that social media is the top dog when it comes to landing high-paying clients quickly.

If you ask a hundred different people how they get clients, then you’re likely to get a hundred different answers. It seems like everybody has a different opinion about the best way to get clients. The tricky part is that most of them work. If you take a strategy and stick with it, you will most likely land some clients.

But you’re not looking for “some clients” here. You want the strategy that is going to be filling up your booked appointment calendar every single week, the strategy that is going to result in sale after sale, reliably and consistently.

The top things to look for when considering an outreach system are:

• How personable can you make it?
• Can you get directly in front of decision makers?
• How scalable is your system?
• Can you build a team around it?
• Will you quickly become the bottleneck for growth?

Cold Calling:

Let’s start with the dreaded cold call! Cold calling is starting to fade in light of new and more scalable outreach methods, but it does still have some merits. First and foremost, a cold call is more personable than any of the other outreach methods because the person you are calling can actually hear a human voice and not just read text on a screen. You can also get a lot more done in a shorter amount of time. If the prospect answers the phone and they are receptive to your call, then you can typically schedule a sales call or a demo in under 5 minutes. Unfortunately, most of the benefits of a cold call end there. Now it’s time to talk about the not-so-fun aspects of a cold call. With cold calling, you’ll call a lot of people before you ever get to talk to a decision-maker. Once you do talk to the decision-maker, it’s very likely that they will either hang up on you, tell you that they’re not interested before you can get three words out, or they might even cuss you out. The real problem with cold calling is that it isn't very scalable. You’re only one person and if you don’t hire any appointment setters, then you become the bottleneck to your own business. You can surely see why cold calling is a tough way to grow your business.

Cold Email

Cold email is next on the list, and it’s a great option for certain business models. What cold calling lacks, email does very well. It’s extremely scalable and you can get directly in front of a ton of decision-makers. You can show up directly at the “digital front door” of decision-makers in every industry. If you want to go the extra mile and pay for an email service, then you can possibly send thousands of emails in a day. But there are some things to watch out for, namely ending up in the spam box. Email accounts can get shut down if their emails are marked too much as spam. This can cause a chain reaction that ends with your internal emails to team members or even current clients going directly to their spam box. Overall, though, email is a fantastic outreach model. It just takes a little more time than other options because you usually have to send a lot of follow-up emails in order to get a response. Also, finding the email addresses you want to contact can be a pain. A spreadsheet and LinkedIn Sales Navigator are going to be your best friends when it comes to cold email.

Public Networking Events

Moving on, we have public networking. Usually a fantastic option, public networking stalled because of the pandemic, but it is now on the rise and it can be great when there isn’t a lockdown. Just like with cold calling, networking events let you really leverage your personality. People get to know you and appreciate you for the things that separate you from the competition. Events like masterminds, seminars, workshops, and more are all places where your ideal clients can gather in person, and if you mingle enough, you can usually walk away with a few clients, some referrals, and a great network of people to cement yourself into the market with. The drawbacks of networking events are that you usually will have to travel for these events - although virtual is an alternative as well, they’re not a consistent and weekly process you can repeat, and they’re almost never free. You have to pay to get in and then you have to really put on your extrovert face and mingle with complete strangers while being alone. Bringing a friend who’s in the same industry can help mitigate some of the overwhelm, but it’s a very real setback to this method of client attraction.

Social Media

Then we get to social media marketing. This method really takes all of the benefits of the other methods and meshes them all together without all of the drawbacks. Using social media as your client-getting system allows you to be as personable as in a cold call. You can show bits and pieces of your life and really come alive as a genuine person. You can use audio and video to even give yourself an extra layer of personality. While not quite as scalable as cold emailing, social media allow you to have a ton of conversations going on at the same time. If you’re smart and efficient with your time, you can scale by leveraging social media pretty well. Finally, it’s called a social media network for a reason. It’s a giant network of people, and thanks to the group features of Facebook and LinkedIn, you can network with people that would love to hire you all day long.

The main drawback to social media is that they do require your attention. If you’re not on the platform, you’re not interacting with potential clients and friends, and you’re not messaging others and getting them on the phone. That being said, you can spend roughly an hour a day on social media and have some crazy results. So, in a nutshell, that’s why social media work so well as the primary avenue for revenue generation. It’s straightforward, simple, and effective. It combines all of the strengths of the other client attraction systems without their biggest drawbacks.

Next week we will continue this subject and focus on connecting with your clients and customers.  Keep your eyes peeled for Social Selling 101 - Part 2.