January 21, 2019
Are you using Social Selling?
Mary Wagner, Communications Manager
Social Selling
The first word gives it away. ‘Social’ as in ‘Social Media.’ As {almost} everyone knows by now, social media is one of the biggest platforms businesses use today to connect with their target audiences.
According to estimates, the number of worldwide social media users reached 2.34 billion and is expected to grow to some 2.95 billion by 2020. That’s a fairly large audience to pick and choose from when it’s time to sell your product or services.
Social selling is a job in itself. It’s one thing to have a social media account, but to actually utilize it, engage with users, communicate, build trust and relationships, respond to comments and so much more is a whole other thing. It’s a 24/7 job.
“Social selling” isn’t exactly just placing your product online on a social media platform. That’s known as social marketing. Social selling is more focused on one-on-one relationships online. Rather than sending out a mass message and throwing marketing words around, social selling is all about connecting with one user online, one at a time. It’s humanized and more genuine.
Examples of Social Selling
The beauty of social selling is consumers can respond in their own time, without dealing with pesky cold calls and/or marketing emails that interrupt their daily lives. We’re all busy enough already! When you put the ball in the consumer’s court and let them choose when to respond, they are more likely to respect you and consider your products.
Social Listening
Another successful way to social sell is to tune into social listening. Companies use social listening to search through platforms and the digital world and find people who are mentioning either their products or their competitor’s product and/or service. With social listening, your target audience is basically already narrowed down since you’re looking for specific keywords, tags, mentions, and so on. Once you come across a comment or someone actively looking for a service or product similar to yours, that’s where you come in with the social selling. You choose to engage that person online. Once you engage, it’s already a very high percentage that you’re the first one to reach that person.
Example of Social Listening to respond to customer
Social listening also aids you {and businesses} when it comes to finding people who need recommendations. Most of the time, consumers online are actively looking for a new product, service, or solution.
According to the Nielsen study from 2016, more than 80% of Americans seek recommendations when making a purchase of any kind. People are inherently social and are ready to make purchase decisions based on the opinions of others. {Data from Awario}
People who are actively searching for a recommendation are the ones you can establish a relationship with online almost immediately with social selling. Those people will fit the criteria of your target audience.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, not a lot of companies online do a very good job on social selling. The majority of social listening is used for customer support, making sure they find solutions to people’s issues online… however, no one is reaching out to sell. On the other hand, that gives you and your business a higher advantage if none of your competitors are using social selling!
Example of using social listening for customer support
Learn more about social selling.