Hey you – want to buy a book on social commerce???

Until you bought this volume the answer to that would probably have been ‘yes’ for most readers, hence the fact that you have this copy in your hand. Even so, if a shop owner or marketing email had put the question in those exact terms I’ll bet you’d have said ‘no thanks.’ You’d have backed away, probably nervously, hoping the speaker would go somewhere else, no matter how much you wanted the actual book.

This is what a lot of people do in social commerce and media and it’s how a lot of sales fall apart. They pressurize, they do the hard sell, they tell you that you can’t cope without whatever they happen to be offering and they do it with tacky marketing language.

This chapter is for people who want to avoid that. It’s about engaging with people with a view to making more profit of course – if we weren’t doing something about that then why bother – but doing so in a non-aggressive manner, engaging rather than flogging. Anybody who opens up any social commerce or social media channel needs to understand that not everybody who fetches up will be interested in buying something – but that’s not unique to social media. Anybody who opens a shop should be aware that not everybody who walks in is going to spend money. But they’re probably interested in what you sell in the shop, so you can have a conversation and they may come back another time.