04.16.2024 Ryan Humphreys
and is a long-term strategy. For these reasons, it is important to put in the necessary
effort to ensure your results can be guaranteed as far as possible. And social selling success is a two-way street. Statistics show that 75% of B2B buyers now use social media to be more informed on vendors. So, by creating great content, you are setting out your virtual shop window and immediately adding value to those who are researching in your market sector.
There are lots of tools out there to help get social selling right – we’ve picked our top 5 social selling tools.
1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn is the number one business-focused social networking platform and, forprofessional sales people, using their Sales Navigator tool is essential to ensure
efficient and effective social selling. It comes at a price but it brings undeniable
benefits in terms of being able to research and target your prospects easily and
effectively.
2. Twitter
Social Selling isn’t all about LinkedIn. Twitter seems to have clarified its greater
purpose following a bumpy period of confusion and it’s now an essential tool in the
social sellers arsenal. To be effective at social selling, you need to be wherever your
buyer is.
Twitter is especially good for social listening and engaging and staying ‘front of mind’ with your chosen audience. You need to treat Twitter as a professional platform – for example, use an image that relates to that of your LinkedIn profile, and link your accounts so that prospects can find out more about you.
3. Flipboard
One of the most time-consuming elements of social selling is finding good sources of
content. Whenever we’ve interviewed those at the top of the social selling game, they
say this is one of the main activities at the start. But, once they’re established, it
becomes much less onerous. Given that this is a long game, it’s therefore definitely
worth getting to grips with a tool that can help find and curate content. Flipboard does
just that: sourcing industry-specific content becomes automated, leaving you with a
one-stop shop for post inspiration.
4. Buffer or Hootsuite
Next on the list for automation is scheduling. Knowing that your content is ready togo, by using a tool such as Buffer, leaves you free to spend time on the engagement
part of the job. If you continually need to post content, you could miss out on the
chance to start conversations, which lead to deeper and more fruitful relationships.
An added bonus is that you then also have analytics for each post and can even go
as far as to A/B test for the best posting time.
5. Crystal for Chrome
Crystal is a powerful LinkedIn add-on, which enables you to profile your targets and
find out more about what makes them tick. Again, when it comes to nurturing
relationships in order to create the most personalised content, this is an exercise well
worth undertaking.
Ultimately, the key to social selling is to enter the buying cycle early, influence the
decision-making process and limit competitive involvement. With the right tools at
your fingertips, this challenge becomes considerably more achievable.
