Follow These 3 Steps for More Successful Social Selling

Jack Hodges

May 22, 2023

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10 min read

Sales

Businesses often think "social selling" and "social marketing" are the same, but that's not the case. Social selling involves using your company's social channels — Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc. — to connect with prospects and build rapport with them, allowing you to increase brand awareness and nurture potential buyers. It's part of your wider social media marketing plan.

A social selling strategy can support outbound marketing techniques in your contact center, like cold calling, and serve as a valuable tool for lead generation and management. Developing connections with potential customers on social media is crucial for any business that engages in telemarketing.

In this blog post, learn three ways to start your social selling business and how FiveCRM can make it easier to source and nurture B2C and B2B buyers on your social networks.

Key Takeaways:

Build Strong Relationships on Social Media: Social selling starts with building meaningful relationships with your target audience on social media platforms. Engage with prospects, share valuable content, and establish yourself as a trusted industry expert to gain their trust and attention.
Leverage Social Listening for Insights: Use social listening tools to monitor conversations and gather insights about your audience's preferences, pain points, and interests. This information enables you to tailor your social selling approach and provide relevant solutions that resonate with your prospects.
Personalize Your Approach: Social selling is all about personalization. Tailor your interactions and content to match the needs and interests of individual prospects. Deliver personalized messages, address their specific pain points, and offer solutions that demonstrate your understanding and expertise.
Provide Value Through Content: Create and share valuable content that educates, informs, and solves problems for your target audience. Use a mix of formats, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, or webinars, to engage prospects and position yourself as a valuable resource in your industry.
Nurture Relationships with Consistent Engagement: Consistency is key in social selling. Regularly engage with your audience by commenting on their posts, responding to messages, and sharing relevant content. This ongoing engagement helps nurture relationships, build trust, and keep your brand top-of-mind.
Measure and Analyze Results: Use social media analytics and tracking tools to measure the effectiveness of your social selling efforts. Monitor key metrics like engagement, click-through rates, conversions, and sales to understand what's working and make data-driven optimizations.

1. Use Social Media to Research Competitors

Experts predict that nearly 92% of companies with more than 100 employees use social media for marketing purposes in 2021. That makes social networks like Facebook and Twitter a valuable resource for researching competitors in your industry. Here are a few ways to achieve this goal:

Familiarize yourself with your competitors and how they use social media.
Check the language competitors use when connecting with customers and the pieces of content they share on these platforms.
Keep an eye on relevant key terms, trigger phrases, and hashtags in your industry. Use tools like TweetDeck, HootSuite, and Google Alerts to support your research.
Customer-facing businesses might want to monitor Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram when researching competitors. B2B organizations can check Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn groups.

It really pays to check out the social media presence of your most direct competitors. You can learn which social platforms rivals use the most and how they deal with complaints and customer service issues. That helps you discover if other companies have the "upper hand" in social selling. Use their social selling techniques to influence your own strategies and improve your sales and buying processes wherever possible.

You can also take inspiration from competitors' social media posts when creating relevant content for your own social networks. Regularly posting and sharing content (including user-generated content) on social media can improve awareness of your professional brand and encourage followers to check out your products and services.

2. Research Existing Customers on Social Media

As well as researching competitors, it's important to monitor how existing customers engage with your personal brand on social media. Doing so can help you fine-tune your future social selling campaigns and inform your wider social media marketing strategy. It can also help you build relationships with customers and move new prospects through your sales and marketing pipelines. Here are some tips for using social media for customer research:

Check mentions of your company across social media. Make sure your target audience is happy with your products and services, and nobody is complaining about your customer service.
Search for mentions not linked to your brand's accounts. For example, keep an eye out for mentions that tag your social media profile ("@BusinessName"), as well as mentions that include your business name without a tag.
If you come across social posts that criticize your company or include a complaint, respond to these messages and try to resolve the issue. That proves you are committed to customer service, which can improve your brand image.

Sometimes, searching for mentions of your brand on social media is like looking for a needle in a haystack. A good customer relationship management (CRM) system integrates social media links in account profiles, helping you find pages that belong to customers. Your CRM can also help you find customers' social media pages to learn more about those customers' interests, hobbies, pain points, and purchasing decisions. Use this information to build profiles of prospects before contacting them over the phone. Sales professionals (or "social sellers") will have more information in their arsenal when carrying out cold calls, improving outreach, and completing sales processes.

3. Encourage Customer Feedback

Positive customer feedback about your brand's products and services can improve your social selling strategy. That's because good reviews can build credibility, positively influence purchasing decisions, and make it easier for telemarketers to connect with prospects over the phone. Research suggests that 89% of consumers aged 35–54 trust customer reviews as much as personal recommendations, making feedback a lucrative social selling strategy.

Increase your awareness of how customers can leave positive feedback about your products and services. Google and Facebook, for example, have a 0–5-star rating system for business listings, and consumers frequently use these platforms to check out a company's credentials. Encouraging existing customers to leave feedback on these channels could help your brand image.

If your business is a restaurant, hotel, or brick-and-mortar store, don't underestimate the power and influence of websites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. A profile on one of these sites and a few glowing reviews will raise your business profile and set you apart from competitors in your industry. That can make it easier for agents to improve sales techniques over the phone.

Online retailers can achieve social selling success by encouraging customer feedback on product review websites like Trustpilot and Feefo. These sites enable consumers to review an individual product or your business as a whole.

Bonus Social Selling Tip: Use Social Buy Buttons

Social buy buttons encourage online consumers to purchase your products by providing instant e-commerce gratification. Brands use these buttons on social networks like Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram to drive prospects to their website product pages and increase sales.

Social buy buttons can support the purchasing process by bringing prospects closer to a sale. You can minimize the time it takes for a potential customer to make a purchase and generate a revenue stream from your favorite social media platforms.

Conclusion

FiveCRM is a CRM for call centers that lets agents connect with customers on social media. The platform integrates social links into account profiles, helping sales reps learn more about a customer's interests, hobbies, and purchasing decisions before engaging with them over the phone.

Unlike traditional CRMs, FiveCRM has analytical tools that provide insights for social selling. Identify trends and patterns in customer data that make it easier for salespeople to connect with prospects during outbound calls and convert those prospects into bonafide customers. In-built email marketing capabilities can also move prospects through sales funnels.

Here are some FiveCRM use cases that also enhance telemarketing in your call center:

FiveCRM manages workflows, callbacks, follow-up calls, and automated dialing sets. Reduce call transition times and boost sales prospecting and efficiency when using this platform.
Manage up to 999 separate databases and benefit from unlimited data storage for growing and scaling your business.
FiveCRM's specialized marketing and performance tools boost lead generation by tracking operational performance and capturing lucrative new leads.
Customizable lead scoring tools help agents improve lead management by nurturing the most profitable leads in your sales cycle.
Generate and monitor real-time data about departmental performance and use metrics to influence your sales strategy and boost sales growth in your call center.

Contact hello@fivecrm.com for a demo, or get FiveCRM now.

FAQs

Q: What is social selling?

A: Social selling is the process of using social media platforms to connect, engage, and build relationships with prospects and customers. It involves leveraging social networks to share valuable content, provide personalized interactions, and ultimately drive sales.

Q: Which social media platforms are best for social selling?

A: The choice of social media platforms depends on your target audience and industry. LinkedIn is widely used for B2B social selling due to its professional nature. However, platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram can also be effective, depending on your business and audience preferences.

Q: How does social listening benefit social selling?

A: Social listening involves monitoring social media platforms for mentions, keywords, and conversations relevant to your industry or brand. It helps you gain insights into your audience's needs, pain points, and interests, allowing you to tailor your social selling strategy and provide relevant solutions.

Q: What role does content play in social selling?

A: Content plays a crucial role in social selling. By creating and sharing valuable content, such as blog posts, videos, or infographics, you position yourself as a trusted industry expert and provide value to your audience. Content helps educate, engage, and nurture prospects throughout their buying journey.

Q: How important is personalization in social selling?

A: Personalization is essential in social selling. Tailoring your interactions, messages, and content to individual prospects demonstrates your understanding of their needs and helps build stronger relationships. Personalization shows that you care about their specific challenges and are committed to providing relevant solutions.

Q: How can I measure the effectiveness of social selling efforts?

A: Measuring the effectiveness of social selling involves tracking key metrics like engagement, click-through rates, conversions, and sales generated from social media activities. Social media analytics and tracking tools can provide valuable insights to gauge the impact and optimize your social selling strategies.

Q: Can FiveCRM assist with social selling efforts?

A: FiveCRM offers CRM solutions that can support your social selling efforts. Our software provides features like lead management, contact segmentation, and analytics to help you track and manage interactions with prospects on social media. Contact our team to learn more about how FiveCRM can enhance your social selling initiatives.

Michael King says...

"I can’t think of a time where a client has requested something that we weren’t able to do with FiveCRM. Unlike most systems, it has a lot of flexibility."

Managing Director, Senior Response

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“Each client, and each of their campaigns, has its own unique specifications. We essentially needed to set up mini CRMs on one platform to meet those requirements.”