Social selling is not social media marketing or social media advertising. Instead, it’s a method that allows you to laser focus on business contacts and create relationships to build rapport with leads. It’s a way to replace cold-calling business contacts and get better results from your rapport-building efforts.

Only the most social media savvy businesses have incorporated social selling into their marketing strategies. By leading the way, you get your foot in the door first, increase sales, and build better relationships.

If you’re curious about social selling, what the social selling index is, and everything else you need to get started with social selling, then keep reading as we take you through the process.

What Is Social Selling?

Social selling uses your brand’s social media accounts to engage and develop a relationship with prospects to ultimately turn them into leads. Your efforts attempt to make prospects think of you first when they need services or products that you offer.

You shouldn’t use your social media accounts to send your prospects direct marketing and advertising messages. Instead, you should be creating content that shows a problem that your audience may be facing and offer real solutions to that problem in a genuine way and less of a marketing way that specifically pushes your products and services.

You build yourself up to be a genuine content creator rather than specifically a business. People should be turning to your social media channels for answers to questions and problems they’re facing, not just to buy something that they’ve already found the solution for,

You may already be performing basic social selling through your posts and not realise it, so it’s important to understand and use social selling effectively with a real strategy.

What Is The Social Selling Index?

The social selling index (SSI) is simply a way you can measure the effectiveness of your social selling strategies. 

Before you run away and try to google social selling index, you should know that there is a LinkedIn social selling index tool that provides the measurements and easy access to understand how you’re doing.

LinkedIn created the idea of a social selling index, and many others have implemented similar tools or methods. The LinkedIn social selling index measures four key areas that are checked.

• Have you established a professional brand LinkedIn profile that is being well managed?
• Are you finding the right people on the platform?
• Are you sharing relevant and engaging content?
• Are you building relationships and keeping them strong?

While LinkedIn’s social selling index is somewhat specific to them, the same ideas can be used across other platforms; just google social selling index with the platform you use and see what tools are used and what methods are used in each index.

What Happens If You Lead The Way With Social Selling?

If you decide to lead the way with social selling, you’ll see benefits for your business and your employees. While it shouldn’t be your only method of selling, it’s a highly effective one that builds excellent relationships and loyalty with people.

Benefits For Your Business

• Increase your brand awareness. By leveraging your employee’s social media accounts or building new accounts for them, they are connecting to past customers, friends, colleagues from a wide range of businesses. This is an opportunity to bring awareness to your brand through multiple natural connections to people that may otherwise not interact or know about your business.

• Drive higher quality leads. As your brand awareness increases, your leads will be increasing as well. By providing high-quality content through your social selling teams that is educational and more personal, people will be taking notice and are more likely to engage with real people than through generic business accounts pumping but sales articles.

This is an especially big benefit if you utilise your entire employee base and not just your sales teams, it opens the doors to past employees and colleagues of your overall teams, which can be a massive opportunity.

• Increase web traffic and interest in your products and services. As your brand awareness grows and your employees continue to repost, share, and create original content, your web traffic will increase, and your audience will grow. 

Your employees’ contacts will share, their contacts will reshare, and your reach exponentially increases.

• You have increased lead conversion and sale size. Because you’re bringing in leads through natural connections and quality content, it’s less about convincing people of your benefits and more about how best you can fit into their organisations and what else you can do for them.

Whether individuals or businesses, everybody wants a personal connection and not a hard sell. Through your social selling, you’ve created relationships and showcased how you can help people run their business better or fix their problems. 

Benefits For Your Employees

The benefit to businesses by utilising social selling is obvious, increased quality leads. However, there are benefits to your employees, not just your sales teams but other parts of your business, that you can bring on board and use these benefits to encourage their engagement and help with your social selling.

• Builds your employee’s personal brands, especially in areas they already have an interest in.

• It promotes your employees as thought leaders in an industry. This can often result in invitations to conferences as a speaker.

• Improves future career prospects by having a wide range of articles and high-quality contacts published.

• It brings a connection and pride to the employee by being part of the business success and not just a tiny cog doing a specific task unnoticed.

Why Should You Care About Social Selling?

It’s easy to say social selling is the future, but it’s a somewhat unknown term that isn’t used knowingly by most businesses, so if you decide to lead the way in social selling, there are many advantages over other sales methods.

• LinkedIn social selling metrics indicate that:
  • Businesses utilising social selling have 45% more sales opportunities.
  • Businesses utilising social selling are 51% more likely to hit sales quotas.
  • Companies are 78% more likely to outsell competitors not using social selling.

• Over the past 2-3 years, in-person sales events and meetings have been sidelined, and almost all sales are made online now. As a result, you no longer get access to conferences, events, or anything else to reach leads.

Social selling is a new approach to replace what has been lost and may not be coming back.

You can also setup alerts or social listening tools to take you to conversations where your business or niche is being discussed and allow your team to engage and offer solutions without pushing sales.

• More people are turning to social media to buy and research brands. Having good marketing speak and the product isn’t enough anymore. Businesses are looking for partners they can trust who share are authentic and engaged in solving problems and not selling products.

Social media is seeing huge increases in people flocking to it, with a jump of 13% in 2020 alone as the pandemic started, and it’s almost two years later with increases constantly and people becoming more used to interacting on social media.