How to Use Social Networks to Help Sell Your Business

Being a powerful reputational tool for any brand, social channels require a skillful strategic approach. Over 70% of millennials do a preliminary study of online business presence before stepping foot into a real store.

If you are planning on selling your brick-and-mortar business, then social media is a kind of showcase that can reach a huge audience of potential buyers with an offer they can’t refuse. You need to be prepared for a comprehensive check by all interested parties: they will study the number of subscribers, likes and comments, the speed of your response, and the quality of interaction.

The universal availability of Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms allows you to expand the search space of clients significantly. But on the other hand, the more channels you have, the more you need to work on the correct and competent approach to each of them. After all, you do not want to discourage prospective partners and show them your brand in the negative light.

So, what can you do on social platforms to ensure the successful sale of your business at an attractive price?

Show Strong Brand

Virtual reality depends on an actual one in how well and skillfully you can transfer and display all its features online. This is a kind of make-or-break task: choosing a certain path and adhering to it for a certain time, you will most likely see the results only when it is too late to change anything. Another bad case scenario – changes would be so difficult to apply, making it easier to start from scratch. However, no one has the magical ability to erase people’s memory arbitrarily. Therefore, we must write our strategy fair without corrections and erasures, not relying on non-existent drafts.

Building a brand with the support of social platforms is obviously much easier and faster than without them. Hence, an online presence is too important to miss out on.  Expanding your business online gives you additional options: instant communication with clients, quick feedback, the ability to share news and important information, hold contests, and online broadcasts. The modern business paradox is as follows: although you are much farther from your clients physically (than if they were right in your store), you are actually closer to them because you can engage in a dialogue with them at any moment.

So, tip number one: give your brand good online visibility. The stronger it stands on its own, the higher the price you can ask for it, and no one will be able to contradict it. Facebook alone has more than 2 billion users; definitely, this amount includes those who are interested in your offer for sale. So help them find you!

When choosing channels, depart from your audience and where to find it. If you work with aesthetic products, it makes sense to consider Instagram and Pinterest. YouTube is suitable for those who often make interesting reviews, comparisons, and behind-the-scenes videos. Pay attention: we do not seek buyers purposefully; we do this indirectly, developing the brand.

More than 90% of retailers use two or more social channels, and you should not pull up the rear. Provide regular and relevant support for all your channels. Hire a specialist if you cannot or do not have time to do this yourself.

A careless attitude to the profile, irregular publications, and a lack of answers to customer questions will cause indescribably great damage to a future sale transaction. Now, this is regarded not just as incompetence, but rather the disadvantage of the business as a whole, since social presence is inextricably linked with the brand reputation. Everything is interconnected, and the problem in one sector inevitably raises doubts about the respectability of everything else.

Engage Subscribers with High-Quality Content

This tip derives logically from the previous one. Do not think that creating a page and periodically posting something is a sufficient measure to achieve your business goals. Subscribers will not come out from thin air: you need to attract them with interesting content. A page that seems to be alive, but that interests no one, will arouse suspicion among prospective buyers – of course, provided that they even find it.

Social networks do not set measures to your communication strategy, so you should use them to the fullest. Make it interesting for people to follow you: share valuable and fresh information about your industry, give valuable advice, tell instructive stories from your own experience – people love exciting storytelling. Be sure to respond to reviews and mentions of your brand. Grab attention and do not let your guard down.

If your content is truly valuable and unique, then your page will become not only a magnet for subscribers but can even resonate outside the network: no one canceled the word-of-mouth.

Of course, by this point, you probably have a question: what about advertising and selling posts? Should they take place, and how often should this happen?

It’s important to understand that in social media, we don’t set ourselves the direct goal of selling anything. Let’s repeat, here we are building a reputation that will be evaluated by a potential buyer in the future. Therefore, Facebook and others are not the best places for frank commercial appeals.

You can carefully weave certain offers into your information posts but do it unobtrusively, incidentally. Put more emphasis on expanding your brand awareness-raising opportunities: invite people to visit your website, go to your blog, or subscribe to the newsletter. The stronger the connection between your brand and the solution to a particular problem is, the higher the likelihood that a person will contact you when he or she really encounters this problem.

A balanced approach to social platforms will inspire confidence in prospective buyers. If you do a good job here, nobody will be able to call your marketing competence into question, as well as to doubt a correctly constructed communication strategy and openness towards customers. Each response to a request, comment, or complaint increases the value of your business in the eyes of buyers. Social platforms do not provide an opportunity to hide something, including negative aspects, so you can only play this game honestly.

Cover Different Channels

The reputation field is not limited to your page only. Therefore, you can well reap the benefits in its other corners. It’s about thematic groups related to the direction of your occupation, where people from your industry get acquainted, discuss pressing matters and news, and ask questions.

Why can such community and networking opportunities be useful? Everything is simple.

Firstly, this is another and, importantly, rather a simple opportunity to establish your authority. If you can help with an answer, give advice, or just participate in a discussion – your reputation points will increase significantly in the eyes of a large number of people. 

Secondly, it is quite possible that in such a community, you will come across your future buyer. And even if they do not reveal their desire to buy something openly and immediately, they may very well look at the representatives of various organizations, then go to their pages and continue research there. The world is a small place, and you don’t need to exclude the likelihood that exactly in this way, you will find a person who will happily make a deal with you.

Demonstrate Ready Base For Transition

The transparency of social platforms can significantly speed up the process of selling the business due to a large amount of data in the public domain. The better you designed and maintained your profiles, the more data the buyer will have, and the smoother the business transition into his or her hands will be.

When making a purchase, the buyer will know how many subscribers you have, what is your tone of communication with them, what types of content have the greatest resonance, which opinion leaders support you, and so on. He or she will also understand how your business deals with problems, if any, what values ​​you are promoting, which aspects distinguish you from competitors, and which need to be further improved.

Thus, the buyer is immediately armed with a huge amount of valuable information, which significantly reduces the preparatory period and allows him or her to immediately hit the ground running after the transaction is completed. This is very convenient: time is not wasted and both sides remain satisfied.

Wrapping Up

So, all you need is a strong, active, as well as competent online presence. It sounds much simpler than it actually is, but we are sure that you can handle it. In the end, you just need to display the true face of your business in online space and be yourself: this is the best way to show the buyer that the game is worth the candle.