Social selling has become an important tool for salespeople as more and more of our lives move online. By using social media networks, salespeople work at building relationships which may later turn into customers. Let’s take a look at five aspects involved with social selling.
1. Your audience
The people you interact with online may become your customers. But are you talking to the right people? With social media platforms, you can search for people with certain criteria on the platform. Especially if you use LinkedIn, you can search for people who fit your audience profile.
2. Your network
There are five popular social media platforms which most people use to interact on. They are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok. You must identify which platform your audience uses the most and ensure you have a presence on that platform. This is where you will start to build your relationship with your audience.
3. Your content
It is crucial that at least 70% of your content is informative and interesting to your audience. By putting out content, which is accurate and informative, you will build a name for yourself and become trusted amongst your audience. You can put sales messages out occasionally but ensure that you don’t inundate your audience with requests for them to buy from you all the time. This will quickly show your audience you are only interested in the money and not interested in building a relationship with them.
4. Your timing
When you post content onto your social media page, you need to ensure you time it right so that it will get seen by most of your target audience. Secondly, you should try to post consistently, this will lead to your audience anticipating hearing from you and looking out for your posts. You can do A/B testing to see when the best time is to schedule your posts.
5. Your analytics
Most platforms have analytics which can tell you who your audience is and how well your posts are doing. You can use the analytics to see when a good time is and make more content that resonates with your audience by the amount of interaction there has been with it through likes, comments, and shares.
By considering these five aspects, you are well on your way to using social selling as a relationship-building strategy. This is crucial in the current sales environment as more customers will research your business online and other options before they even speak to you. By having a presence on social media, you ensure you are in the conversation when customers mention a pain point your product or service can solve. You can also be there to share knowledge which helps to build your name as a thought leader in your industry.
Now is the time to look at your social media pages and see how you are speaking to your customers and what information you can give them to encourage them to think of you when they want to buy a solution for their pain point.
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