So what is social selling and how do you measure it?
Find out — inside the video!
Hey, it’s Chia from Brand24 and this week we’re going to take a look at social selling,
and show you just a couple tips and tools that will help you measure and improve your overall
effectiveness... but first, what is social selling?
And how is it different from social media marketing? So, social
selling is the process of finding and connecting with your potential customers through
social media.
This might sound pretty similar to social media marketing, and there are definitely
a lot of areas where social selling and social marketing overlap, but the key difference
between these processes is on the scale and in the way that you connect and build relationships.
For starters, social selling is about developing 1-to-1 relationships with a single individual
(or a very small group of prospects), with sales being the long term goal.
Social media marketing, on the other hand, focuses on 1-to-many communication, with the
express goal of increasing the reach of your message to find an even greater audience…
and this is the basic difference in scale.
Now, in terms of the process, social selling is a really big part of modern day lead generation (and
vice versa) and it's an essential part of nurturing your leads — or building relationships
and developing trust.
It’s a process that you can technically apply to any platform where you might find
your prospects, but it tends to happen most naturally on sites like Twitter and LinkedIn,
where you’re less likely to make anyone feel like you’re intruding on their personal
space. So, there are
4 main aspects to social selling, and this includes: knowing how to find your prospects
engaging them in a thoughtful way, connecting with them and building relationships
with them and also strengthening their trust in you through a strong personal brand.
LinkedIn has a really interesting free tool that helps you measure your aptitude for social
selling, and you might have heard of it before: it’s called the LinkedIn Social Selling
Index
So, this is a tool (or calculator) that takes those 4 factors that I just mentioned into
consideration and
it gives you a score based on the effectiveness of your social selling activities (I’m going
to share a link to the LinkedIn Social Selling Index down below, in the Video Description,
so you can check your own score
The Social Selling Index is specific to your activities on LinkedIn… but the skills that
it measures can be applied to many platforms… like Twitter.
For example, a super important part of social selling is finding the right people.
On LinkedIn, this means
knowing how to use LinkedIn’s search tools to find relevant connections… such as people
who have a particular job title, or companies that might have a need for your product or
service… things like that
and then you can connect with your prospects and follow those companies
On Twitter, it looks a little different
To find the right people on Twitter, you want to be monitoring mentions of your business
along with mentions of key industry terms
For example, Brand24 was featured as a great social listening tool in a keynote (actually,
in a couple different keynotes) during this year’s Social Media Marketing World conference — and
even though we weren’t tagged in this tweet about it, a response to the tweet mentioned
a key industry term that we monitor: “social listening”
And this is how our Partner Program Manager, Barbara, was able to track the buzz that this event
and just reach out and help a user who needed more information about social
listening tools!
This is a perfect example of engaging your prospects in a thoughtful way on Twitter
just be helpful!
Of course, LinkedIn is a different story.
You’ve probably noticed that LinkedIn has undergone a series of changes lately; it’s
become much more social and there are a lot more users who create and share content on
the platform… and most of them are doing it in a way that builds ‘thought leadership’
And this applies to the best way to engage your prospects on LinkedIn: you want to offer
insight and contribute to the conversation in a really thoughtful way.
Now, connecting with your prospects on both Twitter and LinkedIn is simple.
Once you’ve identified your prospects on Twitter, you can follow them and engage with
their content and gradually build rapport, reach out to help them when you see an
opportunity — Twitter Lists and Twitter Chats can also be really helpful in helping
you stay organized and build relationships.
On LinkedIn, you can connect with prospects by sending them an invitation to join their
network or follow them.
The beauty of social selling on Twitter and LinkedIn is that these are platforms where
this feels really natural, and you have much less of a risk of making someone feel like
you’re intruding on their private space — as opposed to those other platforms where you
can ‘friend’ someone — those platforms are a lot more personal, and your social selling
strategies might not be appreciated there.
So, trust is something that is crucial in social selling, and it goes hand-in-hand with
your personal brand.
When you reach out to prospects and begin to build relationships with them, whether
this is on Twitter or LinkedIn, you want to make sure that your profile presents you in
the right light, along with the kind of content that you share.
This means having your prospect in mind.
For LinkedIn, this could mean switching gears and updating your profile to relate to your
potential customers — instead of recruiters… and the same goes for Twitter.
Try to have a complete profile, be active, and share content that’s helpful.
Of course, there’s a lot more to personal branding than this, but having a good profile
is the bare minimum for social selling.
OK, so that’s it for this week!
Thanks so much for watching guys… if you have any questions or some cool tips on social selling to share,
definitely let me know in the Comments section below.
And if you found this video helpful or interesting, feel free to Like, Share and Subscribe to
our channel to see even more videos like this one.
Alright thanks so much for watching guys, have a great one and I’ll see you next time…
bye!