What is Social selling and how to do it right

What is Social Selling

Social selling is a lead generation strategy designed to help sellers directly interact with prospects through social platforms. The concept of social selling challenges the typical transactional experience between customers and businesses, leading to more natural relationships with potential clients.

If you have a business page on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, you might already be engaged in the basics of social selling without realizing it. With this strategy, businesses listen to their target audience’s conversations, find opportunities to connect, and build relationships.

The Benefits of Social Selling

The benefits of social selling are diverse. To generate revenue for your business, you need to find your audience and connect with them on a deeper level.

In the past, finding an audience and discovering opportunities for connections were difficult and unrefined. Now, social media makes it easy to specifically target those most likely to buy from you. Studies show:

• 78.6% of salespeople using social media outperform those who don’t.
• 98% of sales representatives with over 5,000 LinkedIn contacts meet their sales quotas, compared to 52% for those with fewer than 250 connections.
• Social channels influence approximately 92% of B2B buying decisions.

What Social Selling Is Not

Social selling isn’t about bombarding strangers with unsolicited Tweets and direct messages. That’s spam. Don’t do it.

It’s not just about adding new contacts to your list. It’s about making those interactions meaningful and presenting your brand as a solution to a problem. When you do this, you’re more likely to build trust and loyalty.

How to Find Sales Opportunities on Social Networks

Nowadays, when people have a need, they look for solutions in search engines and discuss their needs online on social platforms. By listening to what your audience is talking about on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram using a tool like Sprout Social, you can determine what kind of problems need solving.

The more you learn about your customers and their interests, demands, and requirements, the more you can create personalized sales pitches specifically designed to improve your chances of making a sale. Social selling tactics also help you discover:

• Whom to target within an organization.
• What your competitors are doing.
• Trends in your industry.
• Opportunities for collaboration with other brands.

With social targeting, sellers can demonstrate how a company’s products and services specifically solve the problems their customers face. This makes it easier to secure a sale and build a better relationship with clients.

Best Practices for Social Selling

Social media platforms are giving businesses the opportunity to connect with customers on a deeper level, thus improving their chances of making a sale. To win and convert valuable leads through social media, make sure to:

• Create an appealing profile with an informative bio and an attractive image.
• Use content strategically to demonstrate your value in line with your client’s needs.
• Monitor your customers’ conversations using tools.
• Use tools to collect contact information when possible and create email lists.
• Join and create groups to expand your social media community.
• Track the results of your campaigns through analytical tools.

Remember, social selling is about building relationships with your audience by learning what they need from you. As such, the conversation you have with prospects should provide value. Focus on solving the client’s problems, rather than just advertising products and services.

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3 Useful Tools for Social Selling

To increase your chances of acquiring new clients on social media, leverage social selling software. Here are 3 tools to help you get started:

1. Hootsuite Inbox

Whether your brand’s social selling techniques involve private messages, public messages (like comments), or both, Hootsuite Inbox will keep everything organized.

Think of this social selling tool as a convenient way to keep all your brand’s social media conversations in one place. Using Hootsuite Inbox, you can monitor, organize, and respond to any private or public message your brand receives across multiple social platforms.

Keeping your social media communications organized is a way to ensure no message is missed and that everyone who connects with you receives a response.

Other useful features include:

• Practical filters you can apply to quickly find the communication thread you are looking for, even if you handle large volumes of messages and comments.
• Teamwork and collaboration solutions that allow you to assign messages to team members as tasks so that each inquiry receives a response from the most suitable person in your company.
• Saved replies that you can reuse to quickly respond to common queries.

Here’s more information on how to make the most of Hootsuite Inbox:

2. Amplify

This app integrates with Hootsuite and is an effective way for your brand to extend its reach on social media. In summary, Amplify helps your brand increase its online visibility by making it easier for team members to share company updates, campaigns, or announcements.

An employee engagement app like Amplify can help employees feel engaged and compelled to share company content, which is an excellent organic way for your brand to reach new potential customers. This is because leveraging your employees’ personal networks extends the reach of your content.

3. Salesforce

This app also integrates with Hootsuite and is an easy way to search, edit, and monitor new business leads.

With Salesforce, you can search for new customer or prospect records in the app directly from Hootsuite streams. Additionally, Salesforce simplifies contacting potential clients and their classification. You can also add more details to existing Salesforce records to inform future social selling conversations.

Selling has always been about building relationships, establishing credibility, and providing the right solutions to the right prospects at the right time. Social selling is the same. It simply leverages social networks to help you build relationships, expand your network, optimize opportunity generation, and meet your sales goals.