Understanding Social Selling
The key to success with social selling lies in continuously measuring engagement with your target audience. This will help you to build new relationships and improve your social media strategy. You can track engagement through KPIs like impressions, reach, referrals, and conversions. Another important metric to track is response rate. These KPIs will give you a 360-degree picture of your social media performance.
Components of a social selling strategy
Social selling is a strategy that involves connecting with prospective customers who are interested in your core competencies or products. It’s also a great way to nurture relationships with paying customers. For example, online audio retailer Sweetwater assigns customers to sales engineers, who then periodically email the customers and follow up with personal thank you notes. This has resulted in significant repeat business.
Besides being highly effective, social selling also increases brand value. Research shows that social sellers create 45 percent more sales opportunities than their non-social selling peers. In addition, social selling management tools can help you accelerate your sales. One such tool is LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index, which ranks the effectiveness of your social media activities.
Social selling is becoming more popular than ever, outgrowing traditional sales practices and B2B industries. With nearly 49% of the world’s population using social media, this new selling strategy is changing the selling space. Brands, salespeople, and companies are riding the waves of this growing marketplace. In the world of social media, everyone is trying to break through, competing for social share.
Tools
A tool for understanding social selling can help you create a better social media strategy. It can help you generate more leads and engage with your prospects. The tool allows you to organize, schedule, and monitor all of your social media interactions in one place. It also includes helpful filters that can help you quickly find specific communication threads.
The right tools for understanding social selling can also help you identify influencers in your niche. Tools like Followerwonk, PeerIndex, and BuzzSumo can be helpful in this regard. These tools are free, and they work by looking for those who have the largest number of followers. These followers tend to pass on content to their followers, so they are an excellent source for boosting your social selling strategy. Tools like Mentionmapp can also be useful for identifying influencers in real-time.
Social selling tools also enable sales coaches to develop an effective coaching program. A solid sales coaching program starts with identifying seller weaknesses and identifying the most effective ways to help them improve. These tools also give sales coaches a way to track the techniques of top-performing sellers and different buyer personas. For example, a top-performing sales rep may use their LinkedIn page to connect with their peers.
Measurement
One of the most important aspects of social selling is measurement. Without measurement, the effectiveness of social selling efforts will be compromised. By understanding how your online audience responds to your content, you can make improvements in your approach. Measurement can also help you track the number of sales generated through social media. As social media continues to grow, it is imperative to evaluate its effectiveness.
One important metric in social selling is click-through-rate. This metric indicates the percentage of visitors who click your link and visit your website or blog post. A low CTR can indicate flaws in your social selling strategy. For example, your Facebook ad campaign might be generating fewer clicks than other types of ads.
Other social selling metrics include the LinkedIn Social Selling Index. This tool gives you a score out of 100 that increases as you use social selling. The index measures a variety of things, including regularly searching and connecting with the right people. It also tracks the amount of content shared, which is another essential metric in social selling.
