Written By: Cheryl Ellemberg, www.abdpromotions.com, www.gilroypromo.com
How can you tell when you meet someone if it’s the real thing? Today, you can meet someone over the internet, through social media, or you can see someone locally at the store, etc. In fact, there are more opportunities to meet people but how do you know it’s the real thing?
For small business owners, trust is important. You want to be sure that if you are working with a client, they will pay you for products delivered or services rendered. When working with a vendor, you want to make sure they will deliver the high quality product or service with the agreed upon time frame.
When dealing with social media, here is another entity where you are not sure who you are working with. As we built the social media platforms through Twitter, Facebook, or Linked In, you begin to get a hunch about who is in it for real and who isn’t. Here are some tips:
1) Look for Automated messages – An automated message by itself is not a huge indicator but rather the follow up behind it. Did they ask an open ended question about your business and when you answered, did they take the time to reply to your specific question?
2) What are the Asks – Did they ask you to do something for them and not have it reciprocated? For instance, if someone takes time to “follow” you on Twitter, did you follow them too? It doesn’t cost any money. It is seen as a reciprocated action showing that they are putting you on equal footing.
3) Who are you? – If you follow someone because they are interesting, inspiring or intriguing, that is in itself enough sometimes but when you are building a customer base, there has to be some give and take in a relationship. Reciprocated actions really do mean something when someone extends themselves out to you.
All in all, when learning about someone, actions really do speak louder than words. It is much easier to begin conversations when we all do a little bit to meet in the middle.
It’s all about content, consistency, communication and compassion.
