If you don’t incorporate social selling into your overall sales strategy, you’re likely missing out on opportunities to grow your profits.
Let’s be clear. Social selling isn’t about hard-selling to your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter followers.
Instead, it’s about zeroing in on potential customers and building rapport with them to support your efforts to convert leads into buyers.
While developing and implementing a solid social selling approach can be challenging, there are strategic ways to optimize your efforts to make money off social media.
Jumpstart your social selling initiatives with the four tips below.
1. Offer value to audiences to establish your brand
Social selling focuses on nurturing relationships and building trust with your social media audiences.
One of the best ways to achieve this is to establish your brand’s credibility by providing valuable content to your social media audiences. Doing so helps you position your company as an industry expert.
Create and share compelling, valuable, and shareable content across your social media marketing channels.
The content can include trending topics and posts that touch on or address your target audience’s pain points, such as how-to tips or seasonal fashion trends if you’re an online retail store.
However, creating compelling social media content to strengthen your brand’s credibility can be a huge time-suck. It can also eat into a chunk of your resources.
The key is to simplify your content planning, creation, posting, and distribution with a reliable social media marketing platform.
Vista Social provides the essential and sophisticated features to speed up your social media content creation and management.
The platform lets you create, edit, and schedule the content you want to share for auto-publishing on your preferred dates and times.
Image source: vistasocial.com.
The platform also provides other advanced SMM features, from handy TikTok tools for marketing, such as engagement tracking options, to a social listening functionality that lets you monitor mentions of your brand within your network.
Image source: vistasocial.com.
Leverage the social listening tool to know what social media users say about your brand. You can use the information to refine and tailor your content to your audiences’ needs and interests.
Speed up your content production and publishing process with the right tool whether you use Loomly, or Hootsuite, or Vista Social.
This way, you can provide valuable content to the right audiences at the best time. It can help you get higher engagement and more sales opportunities.
2. Share shoppable posts
While social selling doesn’t focus on hard-selling, you can still inject sales elements into your social media content and marketing strategies to encourage purchases.
An excellent tactic is to share shoppable Instagram and Facebook posts.
The shoppable post from skincare brand Follain is a classic example.
Image source: facebook.com.
Social media users can click on the shoppable post icons and get taken to a dedicated page with more details about the product.
Shoppers can see the item’s prices and variations or click a specific button to view and buy the products on the website.
Image source: facebook.com.
Create shoppable posts to make it easy for social media users to shop for your products.
You can provide seamless shopping experiences while helping your prospects learn more about your brand and products.
The strategy can encourage your social media audiences to buy from your business, increasing your sales opportunities.
Remember to include shoppable posts in your content tracking strategies to learn which ones get the best responses, high engagement rates, and more conversions and sales.
3. Personalize your messaging
If you don’t want to turn off social media audiences quickly, avoid using generic, cookie-cutter messaging that they’ve heard before from countless other brands and users.
If you do, your target audiences are not likely to remember your brand or offers, potentially ruining your chances of engaging them and closing sales.
The key is to personalize your social selling messaging by:
- Acknowledging mutual professional contacts with your potential customers
- Referencing a piece of content you and your prospects reacted to or shared
- Highlighting shared interests with your audiences or anything else you have in common
- Answering queries in your comments section. For instance, if you share a post about your B2B company’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services and someone comments asking how to buy SEO articles, respond and provide more details by sharing relevant links to your landing page.
Personalizing your social selling messaging can make your company seem more human and less of another faceless brand. It can help you provide meaningful interactions with your followers.
Personalization also helps you form authentic connections and build trust with your social media audiences, supporting your efforts to convert passive viewers into buyers.
Additionally, interacting with your audiences by joining conversations and replying to comments can help your brand appear as more genuine and relatable.
For instance, you can respond to social media user comments on your Facebook posts, like how BarkBox does.
Image source: facebook.com.
Replying to comments is a great way to make your audiences feel special and heard, helping you provide memorable, personalized experiences that drive engagement and sales.
4. Optimize your social media profiles for selling
Your social media profiles and accounts need to go beyond serving as your digital resume. These should actively support your efforts to build your brand’s reputation with your potential customers.
Design your social media profiles with your target audiences and prospects in mind to increase your chances of achieving successful social selling.
Below are a few tips to help you optimize your social media profiles for social selling:
- Use a professional picture or your company logo as your profile picture. It makes it easy for audiences to recognize your brand on social media platforms.
- Add a positioning statement in your Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social profile bios that include a mini-insight into your brand and what it does. Also, add a link to your landing page.
Sennheiser’s Instagram bio is a great example of this.
Image source: instagram.com.
- Include relevant hashtags your audiences already follow to make your social media profile and pages more visible and searchable.
Supercharge your social selling efforts
Social selling can be tricky to nail, but not if you know the right strategies and tools to master it.
Try out and build on the tips in this guide to supercharge your social selling strategies.
Getting your expected results isn’t likely to happen overnight.
However, establishing your brand’s credibility through valuable content, optimizing your social media profiles, sharing shoppable posts, and providing personalized messaging and interactions can lead to successful social selling and increased sales.
