What Is Social Selling? Plus how to get Started – Updated 2022

A lot of people ask what is Social selling…

It is an activity that typically will involve developing relationships within the sales process. Primarily, it is focused on gaining popularity in a number of establishments, though it is generally used for business to business (B2B) retailing or highly considered consumer expenses.

Social selling occurs via social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

As outlined by data shared on Hubspot “The Talk of Inbound 2015-2016: Sales Edition” they asked salespeople to ponder the top priorities for the year ahead.

The main response wasn’t terribly astonishing: Over 30% of those surveyed closing more sales together with the to-do list, accompanied by increasing the efficiency of the sales funnel and lowering the space of the sales pattern. All good, sensible goals…

According to the report, “social media sales is cited as a priority for just over 7% of respondents. This is inconsistent with Google Trends data, which shows ‘social selling’ as a term rising dramatically in popularity.” Is social sales more sizzle than steak, or has the practice simply not caught up with the buzz?

What remains clear is there is a missed opportunity here to capture critical contextual information that makes warm leads even warmer, particularly when you consider nearly 70% of sales professionals cite social media sourced leads as the most important leads in the first two quarters of 2016.”

>>>Related Post: 6 Social Media Growth Hacking Tools<<<

The different components of social selling

Personal branding

It involves the use of social media platforms to establish an individual’s reputation and credibility. This is normally done by creating compelling personal profiles which showcase a sales professional’s skills and competencies, integrity, and trustworthiness.

Personal branding can also involve highlighting personal information such as personal interest, education background, and religious affiliation to find common ground with potential clients and channel partners.

Social relationship management

This component typically involves using a digital network as channels for nurturing a current relationship with customers. 

Social relationship management is sometimes referred to as social CRM; which is an extension of the traditional relationship management that critically targets communication and responses with client’s vis-à-vis social media.

The methods used include being attentive and giving an answer to the client’s responses online and reposting end user-generated content regarding the firm. It emphasizes traditional and genuine links, directly interesting with stakeholders in an online chat.

Employee advocacy

Personnel advocacy is when sales competence or other personal affects their own cultural presence to talk about positive reports, insights, and testimonies about their firm with their systems.

Quite simply, this usually includes writing content, hooking up with industry market leaders, giving an answer to questions, and using industry and firm- related hashtags.

Although some organizations give their workers the authority to make and promote their own content, others build rules and even source appropriate content to employees.

Monitoring social multimedia insights

For example, if your company is a proven brand, it’s important to monitor social media to obtain a clear view of what folks think and say about you. If you’re a startup, you pay attention to what they say about your key competitors.

In fact, people who interact in your space should be your prospects, and you can use their posted comments to strengthen your organization’s selling strategy.

For example, assume that most of the users are critical of the competitor’s customer service policies. A part of your organization’s strategy could be expressing your brand’s stellar customer service reputation with case studies and testimonials.

Identifying the qualified prospects

Ensure that you create a profile of your target clients and use indicators such as interest, job title, demographics, employer, and shared connections to contact them on social media platforms.

For example, if you use LinkedIn, you will find qualified prospects for interacting in professional groups. On Facebook, you will find them using Facebook ads to target users, and on Twitter, you will definitely find them debating a trending issue or writing industry news.

Engaging leads with thoughtful content and advice

After discovering your prospects, build relationships with them. It really is highly recommendable to touch upon and talk about their content; answer their questions, discuss industry tendencies, and talk about helpful content which was created to move them through the procedure of decision making.

Giving an answer to the organization’s social inboxes

Among the powerful core bits of social selling is giving an answer to prospects, and rendering it clear that your particular brand is relatable and reachable. Generally, it’s important to regularly react to Facebook messages, LinkedIn messages, and Twitter mentions.

Connecting with the prevailing clients

Basically, aside from creating new leads, social selling is a robust way to nurture the prevailing customer relationships. You may spark interest thus touching your top-level traffic customers on social media and connect with them.

It really is advisable to talk about and give responses to the content; ask questions, and provide targeted content predicated on their purchasing story.

The great things about social selling

Social selling permits buyers to obtain information from various business programs that offer the merchandise or service that they want in. In addition, it permits businesses to:

• Keep control of the number of leads a small business or website may receive in a certain specific period.
• Decide on the merchandise or service to provide to its targeted consumers
• Determine prices according to the lead basis
• Make a range on the physical market
• Pay for the leads received
• Customer retention

Social selling allows sales expertise to maintain contact with recent and past customers in a very non-invasive way. Generally, customer’s loyalty is inspired when helpful content is shared with them and their burning questions well answered.

Customers will be more loyal when they feel there is a connection with the brand and will be less willing to change to buy from other firms. Salespeople should, therefore, produce the right kind of content that keeps customers coming back for more.

Highly trackable

The social network platforms such as Google and Facebook have built-in analytics making it easy to track almost everything related to social media sales. In case a mistake is made, quick changes can be made and results displayed instantly.

Gives a sense of attachment

When sales expertise is hooked up with customers through social media programs, it normally adds a layer of familiarity to each business deal completed. The transactions aren’t a one-way avenue. Generally, any sales made can be an exchange between people; attraction is made and the client experience improves.

>>>Related Post: 6 Social Media Growth Hacking Tools<<<

Level using field

With regards to social media, there is absolutely no specified size need. For example, a one-man firm will benefit in a similar way as multinational organizations. A business only will need a well built and executed website to achieve internet popularity and increased revenues because of this.

Less investment in your energy

Quite simply, Online sales and marketing is a complete time-consuming process, using a website amongst other technical mediums to build brand awareness and promote your business. With social selling, sales pros can run promotions themselves thereby cutting down the calls for other departments.

Cost-effective

Social selling is one of the price effective ways to attract customers and create a stable marketing funnel.
This time this past year you might argue that it was still new and unproven, however, not anymore.

You will discover countless specific and team types of how social media selling is having one on one effect on closing sales, finding opportunities, increasing the speed of offers closing and much more all with mainly social branding and social media marketing

Not only cost-effective but more productive.

We did an A/B test with a client last year, taking fifty per cent of the sales team’s time to continue cold calling, and the other half of their time engaging in social media selling activities. Bottom line, the social offering time generated 40% more qualified leads and opportunities.

It’s just far more effective when you call someone new with context and value. As opposed to trying to shove your product or service down their throats.

The leads are the same but come at a fraction of the cost

In some cases, that means free. You can simply use tools such as Hootsuite to find buying signals from prospects you care about. Or check out my other post for social media growth hack tools here

If you found this post ” What Is Social Selling? Plus how to Get Started. ” helpful or interesting, please feel free to give it a share or like so others may find value in this post.

We will be happy to advise you along with answer any questions you may have, be it with Manual Social Media Management from our team of experts, at a lower cost and yet at a higher level of quality than any automation tools.

Or maybe you just need some professional website design or branding? we have you covered.

Book your FREE no-obligation quote today!

Our normal service area is Bridgend, however, we also cover Swansea, Port Talbot, Brynthethin, Sarn, Ogmore Vale, Maesteg, Llantwit Major, Cowbridge, Barry, Penarth, Dinas Powys and Cardiff.

We can also offer worldwide remote support, with competitive rates and friendly, professional service. We are here to help.

Or simply start a live chat in the bottom right of this page and say hello 🙂