The Mindset of an Online Consumer in Social Media

If you are looking to convert through social media, you have to recognize that it is a completely different task than converting traffic from a search engine.

In this post I will quickly run through two situations where the mindset of a person will enable you to make a sale through social media.

  • The must have buy
  • The viral buy

The mindset
First of all you have to take the mindset of people engaged in social media into consideration. Imagine the off line activity when you sit with your loved one in a restaurant and all of a sudden one of those flower guys shows up to harrass you.

In any circumstance other than this one you would probably flick him off and hope he/she goes to hell for intruding with a sales proposal whilst you are trying to engage in some quality time with your babe. However, you see your loved ones face, how desparately he/she wants a flower, whether or not he/she admits it, and so you have to bow to the intrusion and buy a flower. (Don’t try to tell me that you buy flowers cause you want to…)

Secondly, imagine if the flower sales man would come up to you, but instead try to sell you a car. Even though your loved ones desparate eyes might have some effect upon you, I am sure most of the worlds population would be able to resist.

The must have buy
The example above illustrates one of the strongest driving forces behind a buy in social media. The “have to” buy is the best situation you can find yourself in as a marketer. Many social networks have been successful in launching “have to” buys through introducing artificial value artifacts such as icons that you can buy to another person to show them that you like them. Generally these gifts are placed on your profile page of the social network and thus shows your status amongst friends.

Thus, when ever you can find a situation where your potential consumers can earn status from buying your product, you should try to use this in your marketing technique.

The viral buy
Another way of successfully working with marketing through social media is to work with “word-of-mouth” or viral marketing. Taking the example of the loved one again. Imagine if you are currently choosing between two different car models and your loved one says she perfer the one or the other. This will make you more likely to buy the car. Also, if your best friend recommends it, or if some kind of expert recommends it, it is not that drastic to assume that you will buy the car.

Now, there are two VERY important pieces of information in the pharagraph above. Firstly, the person you will be able to sell a car to through social media will have to be in a choice situation. Secondly, the recommendation has to come from a trusted source.

In this post I will not go through how to find people who are in a choice situation or how you become a trusted source, but I will cover this in later posts.

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