6 Action Items to Include on your Social Selling Agenda

By Emily Ceskavich

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For every adviser who picks up 35 referrals from one client on LinkedIn, there are 5 more who have found themselves spending hours looking for leads and trying to book sales appointments through social media networks to no avail.

The trick is in your activity.

In this post, we'll dig into the nitty-gritty by sharing 6 actions you can use to begin getting results from social media. For a guide to help set up your social selling infrastructure, see Tony Restell’s guide, Social Selling Tools, Tactics, and Best Practices (with Examples)

Now that you have created high converting social selling profiles and have stamped your brand on all of the major social media networks, it’s time to proactively identify, engage, and nurture your leads.

 

1. Proactively find sales prospects and lead communities

This brilliant “Sales Search Cheat Sheet” infographic from Salesforce Canada shares search strategies you can use to identify new sales prospects on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

2. Follow industry events and conversations on Twitter

Conferences draw decision makers. These events also are marketed with branded hashtags (#CES2018, #SXSW, #MozCon, #SourceCon, #CTAconf etc.) which makes it easy to discover speakers, attendees, and relevant audiences.

  • If you are attending a trade show or industry event, this can be a great way to warm your leads before you go. Follow the event to build deeper engagement with fellow attendees while you’re there.
  • If you will miss the event, but would still like to engage that community, then create a Twitter list of the people who are talking about the event. Follow up as a way of identifying leads through the speakers, attendees, and marketers who will be tweeting with these hashtags. You can add these engagers onto a list in bulk by using Audiense, an official Twitter partner and one of our favorite tools for finding on-demand social selling insights and leads.

Another way to engage this audience is by sharing the speakers’ content and tagging them as you post.

Twitter Tip: Use Tweetdeck to easily monitor all of your Twitter accounts at a glance, respond to activity, and easily follow the activity of your Twitter lists. You can also track hashtags which will help you discover buying signals in your market as well as follow the conversations surround industry events.

 

3. Use Facebook Ads to Retarget Leads and Drive Sign Ups

Facebook Lead Ads and Custom Audiences have become favorite choices among B2B sales professionals and marketers who wish to generate targeted sales leads. When theSkimm, an email newsletter that has built a lifestyle brand from their news reporting style and social media, wanted to reach new readers, they used Lead Ads to increase their lead quality by 22% and reach a cost per acquisition of $1-2 USD.

 

4. Create your Own Visual Content (no designer needed)

For B2B sales, infographics are engagement goldmines. Not only are they great for SEO and backlinking, but infographics are liked and shared on social media 3x more than any other type of content.

Create visual content to bring attention to your customer testimonials, product highlights, key benefits, stand-out quotes from your blog or website, case study highlights, and more.

There are many free and inexpensive DIY infographic makers out there that you can use. Start by extracting the best tip and insights and reframing your content into visual form. Another tool to add to your social selling toolbox is Pablo by Buffer which allows users to easily create beautiful visual posts for social media and either add to the Buffer content queue directly or download for future use.

Tip: Repurpose your blog content to create infographics that share your best tips and tactics. Pick the lines that pack the most punch!

 

5. Engage your lead communities by participating in discussion groups

One question that I hear a lot is “Which social network has better discussion groups? LinkedIn or Facebook? Which is better for social selling?” In this action-packed infographic by Michael de Groot (@stayingaliveUK) of the personal branding business Staying Alive UK, Facebook appears to be winning the battle with features like events, search functionality, and the sheer number of groups on the platform.

Small business tip: Consider joining Social-Hire's Digital Marketing Facebook group for SMEs.

 

6. Help buyers discover you by sharing content to Google Plus regularly

As a general best practice for social selling, contributing value-added content is an activity that will serve you well on any platform. If you would like to position that content so that your buyers discover you when they search for an answer on Google, then one of the highest value activities you can do is share content to your Google Plus profile at least every 2 days.

Patrick Antinozzi, owner of the web design firm RapidWebLaunch, experienced the benefits of Google’s immediate indexing and social signaling system firsthand when he posted a blog about Pokemon Go at a time when it was already being written about heavily by other publishers. Look at what happened:

 

 

Why did this work?

When you search for a topic or answer on Google, the dedicated search engine wants to show you the results that are most relevant and interesting to you. For that purpose, their clever algorithm looks through your social connections for content that could fit your enquiry.

In this case, the content poster and their curious contact were connected with each other via Google Plus (and likely other social channels). When the friend searched for “Pokemon Go,” they sent social signals that triggered Google’s algorithm which brought the poster’s content to the front page regardless of how new it was or how little attention it had when compared to other articles that were about the same topic.

Combined with regularly adding your contacts and ideal prospects to your Google Circles, you can rank on the front page of Google when someone in your network searches a topic that is relevant to your content.

Tip: Build your Google Plus network with relevant communities, leads, and current contacts who you want to be in front of when they search for a solution.

 

“Sales is a proactive process that needs to

align with the buyer’s journey”

Tony Hughes, RSVP Selling

 

 

The sooner you start taking action on this strategy, the more of an advantage you will have over your competitors who wait until the pain of lost opportunity becomes too much to bear.

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You might like these blog posts Busting 7 Ridiculous Social Media Myths, We All Want Transparency in the Workplace, But is it Possible to Have Too Much?, 5 Ways How Content Marketing Drives Results for Small Businesses, and Why Blogging is Worth Your Tight Budget and How to Make it Work.

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