I recently had the pleasure of facilitating a 3 hour deep dive workshop on how to get more word of mouth referrals. During the day we cover a great deal of information, from networking to caring, to relationship building!
An interesting question was asked during that workshop. An attendee asked:
Do I need to have social media?
My answer simply is YES!
But to expand on that, you don’t need business branded pages or accounts, but in my opinion, you do need to be on social media on a personal level. People interact with you in your business and they often want to interact with you in your personal life. Now, I’m not talking about the folks that won’t let up. I’m talking about the people that like to build relationships with people they get along with.
I call this the High 5 Effect, #HIGH5. This is where you do business with, and hang around people that you just really like and get along with. I always tell people that these are the folks that you like hanging around with to the point where you would invite them to your home for a cookout! Yeah…Really!
Now certainly. You can connect on social with 200 people, but you won’t ever get to the point where these are cookout people! Out of those 200, you might get 5. That’s because some people don’t want to connect much deeper than social media, others have a lot going on, and still, others want to connect deeper but just don’t prioritize it. These relationships take years to get to the cookout stage, in some cases, but that’s ok. You don’t need to get there immediately!
The other reason you need to have social media is because of Pillar #2 that I listed in my book, Listening. When you connect with others on social media, you see all the photos they are posting of their family and their lives. You can see what their hobbies are and what matters to them! Don’t discount social media. You don’t have to like, comment, or share everything. You can always go directly to someone’s profile account and see what they have posted. Those profiles are a treasure trove of information!
So yes, you need social media!