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4. elokuuta 2024
How can you succeed in B2B social selling in 2024? How can you turn your social media into a revenue engine?
B2B social selling is a consistent way of generating leads, conversing with prospects, and establishing branding. This guide to social selling will show you the various platforms where you can yield great results. From Facebook to YouTube, there are ways to connect with other businesses within your industry.
What is Social Selling?
Social selling is the process of using social media platforms to connect with prospects, build relationships, and drive sales. It’s a customer-centric approach that allows B2B companies to build trust, grow their audience, and curate their branding.
How to Get Started in Social Selling?
Here are some of the ways you can get started in social selling. It’s a sales prospecting activity that allows you to connect with your audience.
Find Your Niche
Firstly, you must find your niche before starting your social selling activities. Make sure you perform market research and find which platform is best for you. Also, finding your niche is important to know who your competitors are and what they’re doing in social selling.
Identify Your Audience
Identifying your audience is important because it helps you define your target market. You can use various analytics tools to find out which social selling platform has the most people that fit your criteria as clients.
Set Realistic Goals
Before starting social selling, you need to set realistic goals to help you in making your strategies. Setting expectations can help you define the steps that you need to take to jumpstart your social selling endeavors.
Best Social Media Platforms for Social Selling
Here are the best social media platforms for social selling. They offer flexible outreach tools and analytics to help you find various prospects. You can also integrate them with different sales engagement platforms to fit your needs.
These are the best social media platforms for social selling. According to the 2022 B2B Content Marketing Report by Content Marketing Institute, these are the best platforms.
Here are the statistics for which platforms produced the highest engagement and conversions.
LinkedIn is a social media platform that caters to business professionals from various industries. It’s one of the best platforms for B2B social selling. You can connect with a lot of C-suite professionals and sales managers.
Facebook is one of the largest social media platforms with tons of users. You can capitalize on its big user base by creating targeted ads for various audiences. Sharing valuable content can help build an audience on the platform. According to a 2023 Statista survey, 91% of B2B marketers use Facebook as a marketing tool.
Instagram is a photo-sharing app that’s useful for B2B social selling as a platform to establish brand identity. It’s a great platform for sharing images that provide value to your target market.
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing platform where users can upload, share, and view videos on a wide range of topics. It’s one of the largest and most popular social media platforms, with billions of users worldwide. It’s a powerful tool to showcase your products or services, share industry insights, and engage with your audience.
X (formerly known as Twitter)
X is a microblogging app that’s great for sharing tidbits of useful information. It’s useful for sharing blogs, infographics, and quotes. You can capitalize on its low-to-the-ground barrier to entry by making tons of short-form content.
Best Social Selling Practices on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the best platform for B2B social selling because the platform caters to business-oriented people. Here are some tips for you to take into account as you sell on LinkedIn.
Make Connections
Social selling on LinkedIn is all about direct marketing and cold outreaches. The platform is the best space for making B2B connections. You can approach various professionals within your target market to connect and establish a talking relationship.
Furthermore, you can use LinkedIn’s business solutions to create ads for your specific market. Sales professionals on LinkedIn prefer authentic messages that provide valuable information that’s beneficial to them.
Improve Your Social Selling Index (SSI)
LinkedIn’s social selling index is a rating to measure a user’s effectiveness in establishing their professional brand on the platform. It measures various social selling efforts and the areas that need improvement.
Here are the key metrics you have to take into account to improve your SSI:
Profile: Your profile has to have complete information about who you are and what you do. An incomplete profile can negatively affect your SSI score.
Network Strength: A strong network of people can boost your SSI score. It’s important to connect with other high-quality profiles on the platform.
Engagement: You have to be active on LinkedIn through likes and comments. Additionally, your post engagement is an important factor to take into account.
Use LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a sales tool designed to help sales teams find and engage with prospects on LinkedIn. It offers advanced search and filter options to identify and prioritize leads. It also offers features to track and manage relationships with prospects.
According to LinkedIn’s State of Sales Report 2022 US & Canada Edition, around 38% of sellers use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to gauge buying intent. Here are some of the tool’s features:
Advanced Search: Sales Navigator allows users to conduct advanced searches to find prospects based on criteria like industry, company size, and job title.
Lead Recommendations: It provides lead recommendations based on user preferences and activity. This helps you discover new prospects.
InMail: The tool offers InMail credits that allow users to send messages to prospects they’re not connected with on LinkedIn.
Real-time Insights: Users can receive real-time insights like company updates and shared connections to help personalize your outreach.
CRM Integration: The tool integrates with popular customer relationship management (CRM) systems to sync leads, contacts, and activities between the two platforms.
Team Features: It offers a collaboration feature called TeamLink. The feature allows users to see how they’re connected to leads through their colleagues.
Overall, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful tool for sales professionals to leverage LinkedIn for prospecting and lead generation.
Best Social Selling Practices on Facebook and Instagram
Facebook and Instagram are both under the parent company Meta. They share similar tactics you can employ to get the best results from these platforms.
Utilize the Meta Business Suite
The Meta Business Suite is a set of tools and features designed to help businesses manage their presence on Facebook and Instagram. It provides businesses with a centralized dashboard for managing their pages, profiles, and ads across these platforms.
Here are the key features of the Meta Business Suite:
Post Scheduling: You can schedule posts to be published on Facebook and Instagram at specific times via the integrated content calendar.
Analytics and Insights: The suite provides detailed analytics and insights into the performance of posts, ads, and pages. This helps you track reach, engagement, and conversion metrics.
Ad Management: You can create, manage, and track the performance of ads across both platforms. This includes audience targeting and budget management.
Messaging Tools: It includes tools for managing messages and interactions with customers. This helps you provide timely and personalized customer support.
Audience Management: You can create custom ad targeting based on criteria like demographics, interests, and behavior.
Use Facebook Shorts and Instagram Reels
Facebook shorts and Instagram reels are short videos that offer quick and digestible content for your audience. These are used to provide overviews and brief information.
According to a 2022 Forrester study, 81% of B2B decision-makers stated that short-form content is more valuable when the content is attached to detailed studies or research. You can use shorts and reels for ads and specialize them to target B2B professionals in the platform.
Use Hashtags
Hashtags in your posts can help make them visible and SEO-friendly. You can use relevant and specific hashtags for your niche to be searchable and visible for the algorithms. Moreover, you can also use unique and personalized hashtags to curate your content.
You can use around 3 to 5 hashtags per post to increase their visibility. Furthermore, you can use a mix of mainstream and popular hashtags and a mix of niche and personalized ones. Here’s a sample breakdown of the various types of hashtags you can use
Best Social Selling Practices on YouTube
YouTube is a great platform to share long-form video content with its users. It’s a great app that offers various tools for B2B social selling activities. Videos are an evergreen strategy that always yields results.
Make Product Demos and Tutorials
Create videos that demonstrate how your products or services work and how they can benefit your customers. This can help educate your audience and showcase the value of your offerings. These demos and tutorials provide valuable information for prospects when researching your product or service.
Provide Industry Insights
You can use YouTube to share any industry insights through informative videos on your channel. These videos can highlight key trends and best practices in your industry. Moreover, you can utilize YouTube shorts to create bite-sized videos to reach a wider audience.
Create Long-form Content
YouTube is the best platform to create long-form content for B2B social selling. You can provide value to your leads by creating various videos for them.
Here are some types of long-form content that you can create:
Demos and Tutorials
Podcasts
Training
Promotional videos
Best Social Selling Practices on X (Twitter)
X (Twitter) is a great platform for building up your brand. You can use it to build your brand and reach your audience.
Here’s an infographic from the 2024 Twitter Statistics by Finances Online on why X is the best platform for building your brand.
Regularly Post Content
Social media platforms reward a continuous stream of content from businesses. Regularly posting content in X can increase your visibility to your designated audience. You can post industry news, blog posts, whitepapers, and videos.
Engage in Conversation
You can engage in conversation with other B2B professionals on the platform by starting conversations or replying to tweets. There are several ways to engage in conversation in X.
You can create threads of tweets to showcase long and informative content.
Use X (Twitter) Ads
Lastly, you can use X ads to promote your content and reach a targeted audience. You can use targeting options such as location, interests, and demographics to reach the right audience. Moreover, the platform offers analytics to keep track of reach and engagement.
Future of B2B Social Selling
B2B social selling is a great lead-generation tool that yields consistent and high-quality results. These various platforms are a great way to find new prospects and potentially create new sales and business relationships. Consistency and authenticity are key in social selling on these platforms.
