The Whole Point – Value

Whether you’re on social networks, working on your email newsletter, or blogging on your website, you should be working on getting others to Know, Like, Trust, and Value you. Value is a key component of that, because people that don’t know what you do or aren’t in the market for what you do won’t do business with you.

Early on in the history of using social media for business, a lot of “social media experts” were stressing the relationships over demonstrating value. But if you’re doing all this for business reasons, both are important.

So how do you demonstrate Value? You have to Show Worth.

Don’t overdo it, but do occasionally mention what you do. Although it is called social networking, if you never talk about anything business-related, it’s not much more than a hobby.

You can also become what the online marketing industry refers to as a curator of content.

Simply put, that means you share articles, resources, online tools that are can be helpful to your target market.

And you don’t have to come up with all of them yourself. Obviously it’s great if you create some of those thing yourself, but share what other people have created as well.

In fact, don’t be afraid to link to someone that could be considered your competition, if what they’ve put together is going to help your target market. That even goes back to showing integrity.

Remember, you have to work on all four of the components we’ve been discussing: Know, Like, Trust, and Value. But when getting people to take action online and do business with you, value is especially important. If you leave out value, you have a friend, not a customer.