Social selling is not the same as social commerce. Rather than chasing one-off sales, it leverages social media to nurture relationships. It can drive activity at all points of your sales funnel.
Keep reading to learn about social selling best practices that will turn your social presence into a lead generation machine.
Bonus: Find out what people really want from brands on social—including why they follow, engage, buy, and even unfollow them—in The Social Media Consumer Report.
Social selling means using social networks to connect with, understand, and nurture leads and prospects.
The goal is to establish your value and expertise. At the same time, you build meaningful relationships with potential customers. This makes you—and your brand—the natural point of contact when a prospect is ready to buy.
Originally, social selling was primarily (but not totally) a B2B practice. It involved finding ways for sales reps and teams to incorporate the exponential networking power of social tools into their existing sales process.
After all, sales has always been about building relationships. You need to establish rapport and credibility, then provide the right solution to the right prospect at the right time.
Social selling simply maximizes relationships and connections. For sales teams, this builds an expanded network of qualified prospects. Social listening also allows sales teams to identify new leads. Reps can then reach out with personalized, relevant, and helpful solutions.
It’s no surprise, then, that 78% of sales reps who incorporate social selling outsell their peers who are stuck in the world of cold calls and generic outreach.
What is social selling the inbound way? It flips the process. Rather than outreach, inbound social selling is all about providing valuable social content. The goal is to establish your brand as a market leader so that prospects and customers come to you.
49% of consumers use social networks for shopping-related research. And 48% typically discover brands on social media.
Source: GWI
These self-serve product researchers develop firm opinions about which brands they want to work with or buy from before making first contact with a sales professional.
In fact, customers who find your brand through inbound social selling may not want to talk to a sales rep at all. Nearly two-thirds of sales leaders (63%) in the latest Forrester B2B Sales Survey said digital buying (without talking to a sales rep) would have a significant impact within two years.
Millennials and Gen Z are particularly likely to make significant purchases—even B2B purchases—without talking to a sales rep. Inbound social selling uses social channels to provide the information and resources these buyers need to choose your brand.
The social selling index (SSI) is a LinkedIn metric used to measure the impact of your social media selling.
LinkedIn first introduced the concept of SSI back in 2014. The LinkedIn SSI combines four components to establish a score. It is updated daily.
It looks at whether you are:
- Establishing a professional brand with a well-managed LinkedIn profile featuring valuable thought leadership.
- Finding the right people on the platform.
- Sharing relevant, insightful, conversation-inspiring content.
- Building and strengthening relationships.
To find your LinkedIn SSI score, sign in to your LinkedIn account and navigate to your Social Selling Index dashboard.
Source: LinkedIn
Your SSI report will let you know how you stack up in your specific industry and against your own network, too. Treat your score as a starting point to begin improving your social media selling performance.
For another benchmarking perspective, check your audience growth rate and engagement rate against your industry average using Hootsuite Analytics. You can also analyze your performance against specific competitor accounts.
The best networks for selling with social vary depending on your target audience, your approach, and your social selling goals.
Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are great platforms for interacting with customers. They’re casual virtual spaces where communication comes naturally. And consumers are already using them to find information about products and brands.
Simply speaking, these platforms are great for building relationships for inbound social selling.
X (formerly Twitter) is a particularly useful social network for social selling research.
And LinkedIn is a business-oriented platform. It’s ideal for B2B companies looking to identify and reach business decision-makers. Here, businesses can connect with potential customers directly to try and build a professional relationship:
In fact, according to LinkedIn:
- 89% of B2B marketers turn to LinkedIn to generate leads.
- 62% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn generates leads at twice the rate of the next-best performing social channel.
Social selling on LinkedIn
1. Build your credibility
Ask close connections for LinkedIn endorsements or recommendations. These are posted on your profile and can help give you instant credibility with new contacts. Be sure to offer an endorsement or recommendation in return where appropriate.
On the content side, share relevant, informative thought leadership that highlights your expertise. This has two benefits for social selling. First, 75% of potential buyers say thought leadership helps them determine which vendors to short-list.
Second, the LinkedIn algorithm recently shifted. It now places more emphasis on content that shares expert knowledge or advice. Highlighting your knowledge helps extend the reach of your content. It’s an important way to demonstrate your credibility beyond existing connections.
2. Extend your LinkedIn network
Top-performing salespeople are twice as likely to have expanded their LinkedIn network within the past year. So how do you expand your network?
Start by engaging with the people you’re already connected with on the platform. When you like, comment on, and share content from existing connections, you become more visible to their networks. Over time, you can develop credibility with an extended audience.
Next, use LinkedIn’s search features to extend your network by seeking out mutual connections with your existing contacts.
You can also join LinkedIn Groups relevant to your industry to network with peers and prospects.
3. Try LinkedIn Sales Navigator
If you’re primarily focused on social selling on LinkedIn, it may be worth exploring Sales Navigator. This professional social selling tool can help you target the right prospects with personalized communications. It also allows you to better understand your performance with in-depth analytics.
Social selling on X (Twitter)
Twitter is a great network to use for social selling research via social listening. Twitter Lists and search streams are a great way to monitor content from specific groups of people.
Here are three key Twitter lists you can use to start gathering social selling intelligence on the network.
1. Existing customers
Keep close tabs on your existing customers and watch for opportunities to reply to — or simply like — their Tweets. This will help keep your brand on their radar and keep the relationship solid over time.
Don’t overdo it, though. Be sure that your interactions with clients are meaningful. Only like Tweets that you genuinely like. And only comment when you have something valuable to say.
2. Prospects
As you identify potential customers, add them to a private list. Don’t engage with the same sense of familiarity as you do with existing customers.
Instead, keep an eye out for requests for help, questions, or challenges with your competitors. That way, you can reply with a helpful comment.
You can also start looking for patterns in the kinds of content your prospects engage with, to help guide your own content creation strategy.
3. Competitors
Adding competitors to a private list lets you keep tabs on them without actually following them. This could help spark ideas for your own work selling with social.
You can also gain valuable intelligence about what’s happening in the industry as a whole and what new developments may be on the horizon.
Tip: You can set up X Lists within Hootsuite to help keep all your intel in one place. Find the how-to video here.
Social selling on Facebook
Facebook is still the top social media platform for Millenials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers. And take note: Boomers have high purchasing power and are more likely to have purchased a product online in the last week (39%) than Gen Z (35%).
Start by creating a Facebook Page. Or turn on professional mode for your Facebook profile. Then use these strategies to start social selling.
1. Create shareable content
Creating thoughtful, valuable content is a great way to highlight your expertise and keep clients and leads engaged.
To maximize the potential reach of your content, make sure you understand the Facebook algorithm. Reels in particular can help your audience grow.
2. Engage with followers
Always respond to comments on your content and mentions of your brand.
Source: TBEX
In your own content, include questions to spark conversations with your Facebook audience. They don’t need to be directly related to your product or service to be effective!
3. Join Facebook groups
These grassroots communities are great places to build organic connections. You can also learn a lot about your community or target market. These are valuable insights to help you better position your own (subtle) sales pitches.
For example, say you rent, sell, or manufacture stand-up paddleboards, or lead SUP classes or tours. There are plenty of Facebook Groups where you could hone and highlight your expertise.
Source: Facebook
More on growing your business using Facebook Groups here.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite offers a couple of important features for social sellers.
First, Hootsuite is a powerful social listening tool. It allows you to find the most important conversations about your brand online. With the recent acquisition of Talkwalker, Hootsuite now offers advanced AI-powered social listening to help find the most important conversations.
Next, Hootsuite Inbox helps you manage all of the private and public conversations you have with people interested in your brand, all in one place. It uses smart routing to direct incoming messages to the most relevant member of your sales team.
Most important for social selling, Hootsuite Inbox connects to your CRM. You always have a full customer profile when talking to leads, prospects, and customers on social channels.
2. Hootsuite Amplify
Hootsuite Amplify is an especially useful social selling tool for brands with a dispersed salesforce, including independent representatives or franchisees. Here’s how it works.
First, your social team creates brand-approved content. They upload that content into the Amplify dashboard. Your entire sales team can access the dashboard and choose which content they want to share on their social channels. You can decide how much customization to allow.
It’s the simplest and safest way to engage an extended sales team on social media without creating brand risk.
3. Salesforce
Salesforce is a powerful, AI-powered CRM that connects your sales, marketing, and customer service teams. Its integration with Hootsuite makes it a useful social selling tool. This allows you to identify and capture sales leads found through social channels.
This provides an easy way to search, edit and monitor new business leads within Hootsuite.
4. Hubspot
Hubspot is another powerful CRM with excellent features for lead generation and sales engagement.
Source: Hootsuite App Directory
Hubspot can also integrate with Hootsuite. This brings social interaction information from Facebook and X (Twitter) into Hubspot to improve your lead scoring models and identify the top-priority accounts.
5. SugarCRM
Source: Hootsuite App Directory
SugarCRM is an intelligent CRM designed to improve sales productivity. It features AI-powered sales guidance to help sellers focus on the right deals at the right time.
Through its integration with Hootsuite, SugarCRM allows social sellers to identify and create leads and cases based on social posts discovered through the Hootsuite dashboard. You can convert leads, search records, and more.
Best practices to engage prospects and close more sales
1. Listen strategically to identify sales opportunities
Your customers and prospects are sharing incredibly valuable information on their social channels—they’re basically telling you exactly what they want and need. All you have to do is pay attention.
Social listening allows you to watch for pain points, questions, and requests for advice, all of which create natural opportunities for you to provide solutions.
Leverage your existing network here whenever possible. Before reaching out to any of the leads you identify, check their following and follower lists to see if you have any mutual connections. If you have a good relationship with a shared contact, consider asking for an introduction.
2. Foster relationships
Put some real thought into your social interactions and remember that your followers are real people who you are nurturing as leads. 32% of people will unfollow a brand account for making generic or automated comments, or for failing to interact with the community.
This is important: 70% of people who follow brands on social media have explicit plans to purchase from them. Losing followers for poor communications skills is an absolute no-no for social selling pros.
At the brand level, focus on making the business relatable and personable. Make sure you have a clear brand voice that allows your social selling team to engage quickly and consistently. Comment on and share valuable content from others in your industry to build your business community.
At the individual sales professional level, look for personal connections when communicating with social leads:
- Acknowledge your mutual professional contacts.
- Refer to a piece of content you both shared or reacted to.
- Highlight a shared interest or something else you have in common.
- Offer congratulations when someone moves to a new position or company.
- Engage with the content they share.
- Be ready to offer advice or help, even if it doesn’t directly promote your product.
- Be an active participant in relevant groups, sharing your expertise and being a good social citizen.
3. Provide real value
When interacting with prospects and customers through social networks, it’s important not to get too salesy. 34% of people will unfollow a social account for being too self-promotional. You need to show your prospects that you’re not just out to get something. You’re there to give something, too.
Hootsuite’s Social Media Consumer Report 2024 found that consumers most want brands to share content that educates, entertains, and inspires.
Source: Hootsuite Social Media Consumer Report 2024
Creating educational and inspirational content provides the additional advantage of establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry. 56% of consumers say that a brand’s social media presence is most appealing when it presents a compelling point of view within their area of expertise. It doesn’t have to be technical! Just share what you know in a way that helps others.
Need some help coming up with valuable content ideas? Hootsuite’s OwlyWriter AI can suggest topics (and headlines) for blogs and podcasts. If you’ve already got valuable content on your website or blog, you can just copy and paste the link into OwlyWriter to generate an engaging social post.
Want to give AI content creation for social selling a try? Check out Hootsuite’s free content ideas generator and LinkedIn post generator.
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