Social Networking

         How to Play the Social Selling Game

Social media can help your company immensely. It helps by engaging your buyers earlier, helping you maintain relationships with customers and letting you get a bunch of market insight. It's also valuable to your business because it can help make your brand cohesive.
Buyers judge your brand's credibility by its presence - or lack thereof - on social platforms. In general, using social media makes sales easier because it creates a connective tissue between your customer and your sale process.
But social media isn't a magic bullet
Having a presence on social media helps but it doesn't translate into instant success. Creating a few social accounts isn't a way to get leads to pour in. You can get thousands of contacts, followers and likes but if you don't have a way to capitalise on it, these aren't going to translate into something that actually impacts your company's bottom line.
It isn't simple and it isn't fast but using social media correctly will allow your business to reap rewards that will repeat themselves again and again. To do that, you need to do one thing...
You need to integrate social selling
It is very rare that a customer is just going to buy something from you based on some social posts. You shouldn't consider social posts a new way to sell - think of them more as another tool in your arsenal. Like all your other tools, it can help you with the sales process.
These are the tops ways to use social selling.
Be helpful
It isn't just about making connections. Using social media to answer questions from prospective and current customers allows you to demonstrate value. You will also play a bigger part in customer retention and satisfaction.
Your buyers are all connected. Making sure that someone is there to answer their questions when they have them is as important as giving your salespeople the time and guidance that they need to use social media.
Do it consistently
Making sure that your social strategy works often takes time that you don't have. You will only get some results from one post so using social media often is important. You also don't want it to take up all of your team's time.
Consider scheduling posts ahead of time (using services such as Hootsuite and Buffer ) and focus at least 30 minutes a day to use social media.
In this half hour, answer questions and comments about your company that have been posted in the last day or so.
If your company has a different marketing and sales team, it is really important that both are involved in the social selling process. It's true that it may fall on the marketing team to run it, but it is important for the sales team to get involved because it can help them earlier in the sales cycle. Consistency is very important and making sure that the process is defined will let your company achieve this.
Do it with purpose
You should have purpose when you engage with someone on a social platform. The purpose can be varied - it can be to simply increase your visibility or to follow up on a lead but it should always have a goal.
Knowing the purpose means that your sales team is always going to know just how valuable being engaged in social media is, instead of just feeling like there is another thing they have to do with their limited time.
Remember, it's not quick and it isn't easy, but it works.