Social media is just that: social. So start being social and make new friends, link to groups and people who could be potential customers or Brand Champions. Having all your platforms linkedwill greatly assist you in this process. Ask questions, answers questions, make comments, repost cool relevant items and be nice.

Ok, not nice all the time. Nice people online are boring and often forgotten. Ruffle the feather every so often with a personal opinion on some topic or a short editorial on a hot issue. This will get people talking and sharing a little about what you say.

The main rule for chatting is to lead people back to your website to get them to engage with your product or service. To make this effective, make sure you have a ‘landing page’ for people to click through to. A landing page is a web page specially designed for a specific task, such as selling, promoting, gathering information and the like. Design a landing page that will promote a specific product offering, add a capture form and then blog about it. Add links to the blog to take people direct to the page and not your home page. Add to this by posting shorter posts on FaceBook and Twitter with the same link. Give people some incentive to capture their details and then sit back and see what happens.

It may not work well the first time you try it, but keep at it, change a few things and try again. Keep promoting the page until you have gotten enough response, and then do something else.

Your strategy here is to collect people’s details who have found your offerings appealing. This is what we call your Sales Pipeline. Keep their interest peaked by following up with emails, phone calls and personal visits.