Social media should be an organic sales channel, meaning, without paying for advertising slots. You need to pay for ads when you don't understand how social networks work and you can't reach new users. But precisely what we should take advantage of in social media, is the power of the algorithm to reach a lot of people for free and after that, sell your product/service to them. Think of it as Google... you can pay for advertising to appear first in searches or you can do SEO to try to position yourself at the top, and organically reach a lot of people.

Social media works the same way, if the algorithm likes you, it will show your posts to more people, gaining new followers whom you will then indirectly sell your products in a second stage.

In this initial phase, the goal is to attract a broad audience to your social media content. Visitors are those users who encounter your brand for the first time, possibly through posts, ads, recommendations, or any other type of content shared on these channels. Although at this point visitors may not be actively looking to buy your product or service, it is crucial to pique their interest and get them to stick around your account to explore more. Valuable content strategies, engaging videos, infographics and active interactions are effective in converting general users into interested visitors.

In a sales process, you must first reach new people; otherwise, there won't be anyone to sell to. That is why, what we should care about is the algorithm of the social network we are going to use. If the algorithm likes us, it will show our posts to more people and thus achieve new followers which, in the second stage and indirectly, we will sell our products.

The main effort in social media should be to reach more and more people within our target audience who do not know your brand and then, in a very subtle way, lead them to use it.

If you want to use social media as a Sales Channel then:

If you are a brand and you want to sell a product or service you must speak the language of the platform and this is to educate, entertain, or inspire, and in the most organic possible way.

Forget about selling in the first step. What you must do is reach your target audience, reach the first link in the sales funnel and the only way to do that organically is to speak the language of the platform. If you don't want to do that, you have to pay for advertising or use another channel other than social media. In the following chapters, we will see how to create content that the algorithm likes.

People love to buy but hate to be sold, especially on Instagram where users are there to hang out and not to see ads. That said, the good thing is that social networks are a very active and perfect channel for sales, that's why you should not underestimate your strategy when using social networks.

If the language of the platform is only to entertain, educate or inspire, how do you sell?

Only now when you have an account that speaks interesting content for your audience. You can think about a sales strategy.

Remember that sales tend to scare users so you should not sell in each of your post because that will make your content have no reach.

At this stage what you should do is to search within all that audience and followers that you have achieved, who of them are the ones who are really interested in what you sell. Some ideas for this are:

The goal of this stage of the funnel is to be able to recognize which people of all those who follow you are interested in you solving the problem they have. You literally now know who your potential customers are and not only do you have a way to contact them with more information but better yet, they have already shown their interest and recognize you as an authoritative brand/person.

Once you have already filtered for those who are interested in solving their problems with you or who have shown interest in your product. It's time to contact them to generate a sales opportunity.

By this time you should have already had some form of contact with them, either because they wrote you by DM, you have their email or some other method of contact.

This is how you will contact them and you can offer them a free consultation, a study, a recorded master class, a PDF with the strategy, a link to your website, an attractive discount, or an offer to meet them by call to better understand their needs.

You can have as many steps as you need in this stage of the funnel and that will depend on the level of complexity that your product or service requires. In general, high-ticket services usually require more steps to close the sale.

Finally, the last phase is to convert those opportunities into actual customers, in other words, to make the sale. This step involves closing the deal, where personalized follow-up strategies, special offers, and product value demonstrations are critical. In this step of the funnel, social media plays a secondary role for the first time in the whole process, leaving the product itself as the main protagonist.

To maximize the effectiveness of the social media sales funnel, it is essential to constantly monitor and analyze the performance of the strategies employed at each stage, allowing adjustments that optimize results and increase conversion at each step of the process.

The power of social media lies in its algorithm to reach all those people who are spending time on the platform with your posts. This is the most important step of the funnel, to which we must dedicate more effort and attention. In essence, if we don't reach more people, we won't have anyone to see our products. And as you might imagine, the challenge for any social media marketer is to make an account go viral. This first step requires having a clear understanding of how the algorithm works and a clear strategy for your social networks. In the next chapters, we will focus our efforts on understanding how to reach more users with our networks.