people | Real Communications

5 Steps to Building Relationships with Social Media

Taken from and Thanks to: Jack Kosakowski – @jackkosakowski1 – “a passionate practitioner and proselytizer in the social selling space” (Act-On).

1. Connect
Stay alert to opportunities. You could make a connection with anyone you meet,
interact with, or run into at a grocery store (you get the picture). Many people you
meet will be potential connections or advocates; if you connect with authenticity
and transparency, on a personal level, you’ll begin to develop a relationship that
may pay off later.
Don’t sell at this stage, just connect and build a network.

2. Prospect
Prospecting is a continual process. You meet people and evaluatate whether there
is mutual benefit to building a relationship; if there is, you make a connection. You
should add new people to your prospect funnel continually; just as with the sales
funnel, some will drop out as time passes.
Prioritize vigilantly, and focus on the most promising prospects.

3. Listen
This step is the most important part of social selling. Monitor your social feeds
throughout the day as you’re running meetings, building relationships, and closing
deals. As companies and prospects in your social funnel are communicating, you
will be listening and soaking it all in. This will help you learn what’s important to them.

4. Engage
Now that you have the right prospects and you’ve been listening, you can begin
to engage. Start commenting and adding value to prospects’ social media posts
across various channels. Most companies and professionals don’t get many of these
engagements, so they will appreciate the added ‘bump’ your interaction provides,
as it reaffirms their own presence on these platforms. (Don’t we all love getting a
few extra likes and comments?) Be genuine as you engage and give your honest
feedback. Insincere flattery will cost you the potential for honest conversation
moving forward.
Engagement on social media is a process, and it needs to be done across multiple
channels. As your trust with the prospect grows, your authority in your space will
become stronger. This is a place to separate yourself from the competition.
As you engage, you build credibility.

5. Add Value
Start contributing to the relationship by educating people who are looking for
answers. You’ve figured out what’s important to them and you’ve started to
get noticed. Now you begin demonstrating the value that you can add to the
relationship. Start sharing your content and be strategic about it. If you’ve done
your due diligence in the listening phase, then it won’t be that hard to post content
that you know they will find valuable.
But take care to get it right. You need to make sure that you are adding value – and
first impressions are everything. Your prospect won’t let you waste their time twice.
Deliver the right content, in the right place, and at the right time you’ll get lost in the
crowd – or written off as irrelevant.

Be smart, be persistent, stay engaged, and always add value.

Some thoughts and comments on the PRISA conference held at Emperor’s Palace, Kempton Park on 9 and 10 June. The theme was “Managing Reputation on our Threatened Planet.”

As a Corporate Communication and PR consultant focussed on reputation management, I felt I had to attend. It would be the place to meet the movers and shakers, the decision makers of PR in South Africa. A great opportunity to network and meet people I could do business with……

But sadly, there were very few private business owners there, and the quasi-government organisations were represented by people unable to talk to me about possibilities. So I didn’t achieve my goal of finding connections for future work.

Regarding the speakers, the line-up on the programme was impressive, starting with Prof Jonathan Jansen, vice-chancellor and rector of the University of the Free State. In his usual irreverent style, he criticised the education department for not demanding excellence, and the general lack of a moral compass in a government that did not know the difference between social justice and transformation, between position and influence and between saying and doing. My favourite line: “Why don’t big business deliver textbooks?”

The very humbly gracious Advocate Thuli Madonsela, accepted the PRISA President’s Award and spoke on the impact of the Public Protector’s work on SA’s reputation. Not a charismatic speaker, but wow, she spoke her truth, exuding honesty, quiet commitment and brave tenacity. She was so impressive! Best line: “I am a servant.”

Another speaker I enjoyed was Trevor Ndlazi, of the Reputation Institute. Reputation management is one of my special interests, so I was very pleased to hear that “Reputation IS a tangible asset that needs to be managed”!

Paula Fray, a media expert with a focus on development communication, was a very engaging speaker who clearly knows what she’s talking about from years of experience. You can’t beat that.

New kid on the media block, and very popular, is Emma Sadleir, a social media legal consultant, who puts the fear of g-d into you with her stories of how tweets and social media messages, if not monitored and managed, could cause a whole lot of trouble for your company’s reputation.

There were many other good and interesting talks and presentations over the two days, but the one that stands out for me is the presentation entitled “stakeholder interventions” by Nazir Allie, CEO of SANRAL. This is definitely the most inappropriate talk of the conference as it clearly showed how NOT to deal with your stakeholders! PRISA staff must be kicking themselves for such a bad choice! All Allie did was blow SANRAL’s own trumpet, and make it very clear that the only stakeholder SANRAL considers important is government legislators. Very little respect was shown to other stakeholders like the public. He firmly believed that the public must pay for what the government spends on social grants etc. Sadly, Allie has no concept of building and managing his organisation’s reputation. Great pity.