Spot The Passion!

Social media marketing used to be about two things: connect with potential customers and build back-links that would raise up your product's rankings in the search engines, commonly referred to as SEO. Now, SEO (search engine optimization) takes a back seat to referrals and recommendations. For any kind of success with social media marketing today, the focus is all on boosting your product's recommend-ability.

To make your product more likely to be recommended by others is not small feat. For one thing, you need to know very clearly why your current customers bought your product (or service) and the benefit they're getting from it. This requires a different kind of listening on social networks.

1. Listen; listen deeply We are always being advised to listen before you talk and engage on social media sites. Join the community and help before you share your own products for sale, is the advice we hear most often from those teaching social media marketing for small business. Yet, what that really means in practical terms is that you need to listen deeply. Go below the buzz and start to listen for passion.
2. Spot The Passion It is here that you will find the beginnings of a movement. It is that movement that you require to "go viral" and start seeing major traffic! A movement sounds like a grandiose idea like a revolution, but in marketing terms it is simply an idea that catches on and gains momentum. It is when the customer takes hold of the product and promotes it by themselves. It is when buyers become advocates and when the company's advertising is simply demonstrating what the culture of the brand has become.
3. The Passion Comes From Man's Core Motivations A product ignites a passion - the kind of passion that we all want, when buyers become advocates - when that product can satisfy one of man's core motivations. Human motivation hasn't changed with the advent of the internet, any more than it changed with World War I or II or even the Bronze Age! Man may have evolved and created unimaginably sophisticated technology that continues to wow our elders, but man himself and what he needs hasn't changed a bit. Those simple, core motivations are the same as they ever were.

   Human beings like feeling:

   accomplished youthful adventurous transformed connected creative important responsible playful rebellious sensual wise You can see how social media might answer many of those core needs just by their very existence: the sense of being connected, for example. And when a person recommends another product, now they feel important, wise, responsible and sometimes accomplished. Sharing a story of transformation is a popular one, too!

When you spot that your product has answered one of these core needs in a major way, often it will surprise you. More often than not, it is a different need than the one you had expected your product to answer. What a gift! To discover that your product is popular and in a whole new way: imagine the potential future sales you will see now that you know that and can share it with the world, effectively!