If you’re looking to broaden your customer base and increase sales, it’s critical to understand social selling. Over half of the world’s population uses social media, and that number is only going up. As a business in this day and age, taking advantage of social media selling is a no-brainer. So how does a business get started in social selling? Read on to learn how to sell on social media and drive sales.
What is Social Selling?
Social selling is all about developing a relationship with potential customers to generate sales. Gaining customer loyalty comes from an established positive relationship. Social selling isn’t about urging customers to buy now. It’s about building a connection with customers so that when they are ready to buy, they come to a business they already know and trust. In the end, the more customers know about the brand and the business, the better. This is the crux of social media sales.
How to increase online sales through social media
The first step to selling on social media is having social profiles for the business. This means, not simply personal pages that share things related to the business, but dedicated business pages on the various social media accounts. The major outlets to participate are Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. If your business is more professional, you may also benefit from a LinkedIn profile.
Social selling can be extremely cost-effective for both big-name brands and small businesses if the business knows what it’s doing and has a clear plan in place for its social media strategy. The goal is to drive traffic and sway users into completing online payments.
How to Get Started Selling on Social Media
Using social media for your business gives your brand control over its reputation. It’s a way to make your brand more visible to your customer base. One important tip is to use a high-resolution professional image for your profile picture. It is one of the first things a customer/follower is going to see and just like anywhere else in the world, first impressions are vital. Many businesses use their logo for a profile picture, branding their business name on anything they post and stickering their shop in customer’s minds.
Now, let’s examine some of the crucial steps to starting selling on social media.
Determine your audience
Who is the business’s target audience? What are their demographics? Knowing your brand’s customer base inside and out can help you determine a social media strategy and broaden the customer pool. Try looking at hashtags relevant to the business. This can help your brand discover its customer base in addition to joining relevant groups and monitoring competitors.
A great way to reach a broader audience is by using those relevant hashtags in your posts. This can be hashtags related to your industry, specific types of products you carry, or services you offer. If someone searches that hashtag, your business’s post will come up. This allows more potential customers to find the brand.
Narrow down the social media platforms you’ll use
As a business, you need to know what social media platform your target audience is most active on. LinkedIn, for instance, is most suitable for business-to-business (B2B) vendors. Facebook, on the other hand, is much more appropriate for business-to-customer (B2C) brands.
To use any social media platform to its full advantage, a business needs to know the platform inside and out. Stay up to date with new features and account changes to reach users in the best ways. Make sure to double-check any privacy settings so that the account stays safe and professional. Your brand should be on top of what every follower can and can’t see regarding your profile. This is because a good post can drive social media sales quickly, but a negative action can lose sales even quicker.
Network
It’s important to keep an eye on conversations relevant to the brand. Joining in on those conversations is even better. Every business needs to stay current with the trends of its market and be able to use those trends to garner sales.
Your brand should follow other accounts that are related to your business and industry. However, following more accounts than the business has followers can shed a negative light on the brand. Keep in mind, your brand should keep a good ratio of followers to following.
Engage with users
It’s one thing to gain users and followers while social selling, but it’s another to actively engage with them. Every time the business gains a follower, you have the opportunity to market or engage directly. Therefore, businesses should maintain steady engagement with followers.
Additionally, participating in social media groups can be a great way to expand a business’s followers and drive social media sales. These interactions make a profile visible to everyone else in the group, even people who aren’t yet following the brand. It also allows other businesses to see posts from users your brand doesn’t follow. This gives businesses firsthand knowledge of how their fellow competitors and potential customers are using their social media platforms. Monitor these groups and listen to your business’s target audience and competitors to fine-tune strategies.
Provide value
Your business’s target audience needs to find some sort of value in following your brand’s profile. A social media account needs to grab their attention. Your business should use its headline or bio, depending on the social media platform, to tell your customers who they are, what they sell, and what sets you apart from your competitors.
Just like your business’s blog or website, its social media profile needs new content regularly. Posting consistently is essential, but at the same time, a brand needs to find a healthy balance. A business shouldn’t be clogging customers’ feeds with unending posts that make potential buyers want to unfollow them. However, businesses shouldn’t be posting as little as once a month so customers forget them altogether. Businesses should stay friendly and professional while avoiding spamming customers with endless unnecessary content.
3 Ways to Monitor the Effectiveness of Your Social Media Sales
Measuring the results of social selling is vital. It gives your business an inside look at how effective social media management is toward engaging your direct customers. There is no true way to calculate the relationship between social media activity and actual sales, but there are definite indicators to look out for.
1. Listen to your audience
Customers are more likely to use social media to contact brands than they are to call the actual customer service lines of these businesses. Potential customers may even be discussing their wants and needs online. With the rapid rise of social media, consumers began asking questions, writing reviews, and providing recommendations on their various platforms. Consumers are freely giving out information about what they like, dislike, want, and need. The conversations are right there, businesses just need to pay attention.
Your business can track its likes and shares. With a business profile on Facebook or Instagram, you can do this through the business suite manager. Additionally, your brand should monitor how many followers it has and the rate at which it gains followers. If the rate is slow, increasing the number of posts you put out can help. Furthermore, a business should track its mentions by other users and listen to what those users are saying about the brand. Whether it’s positive or negative feedback, a brand should take everything as constructive criticism and ways to improve the business.
Like, comment, engage but don’t send spam customers with random messages. Rather than sending scripted responses to every customer, customize your interactions. Customers want to feel like their individual business is important, not like they are just one of many faceless dollar signs to a brand.
2. Review what your competitors are doing
In one regard, social selling is about jumping on the bandwagon. Social media is where your customers are, but it’s also where competitors are. Your business doesn’t want to be left out of the market when all your competitors are already there. If any business wants to compete in the modern age, it needs to use social media platforms to its advantage.
While we mentioned looking at competitors’ social selling techniques, it’s important to review their tactics. Have you noticed a shift in their strategy that’s working for their business model? Don’t be afraid to take into consideration what your direct competitors are doing.
3. Track engagement
Social media has become popular in every aspect of business, whether the company is small and local or a massive worldwide corporation. Therefore, a large variety of tools to track engagement and monitor social media with plans ranging from free to monthly packages and even yearly subscriptions in the six figures are available.
There are a lot of different tools available to measure social media engagement and determine the effectiveness of various social media platforms. Tracking how many times users have clicked links included in the business’s posts can help determine how much traffic the brand’s social media accounts are creating. Certain tools can detect which social media platform a customer came from, determine which followers engage the most, and compare a business’s social media stats to its competitors. Some tools simply track the comments, clicks, likes, and shares on posts giving businesses concrete data and analytics on the engagement among their posts. Others allow subscribers to schedule their posts in advance or monitor all the business’s various social media accounts on every platform all in one dashboard.
Final Thoughts on Social Media Selling
An unfamiliar brand, seller, or business puts a degree of fear in the customer’s mind. Will their product/services be high quality? Will this business provide exceptional or even adequate customer service? Is it safe to put credit card information on this website? Customers want to know that they’ll be satisfied with their purchase and that their shopping experience comes with minimal risk. Therefore, customers are more likely to purchase products from brands they know.
While business profiles can be funny, conversational, relatable, or friendly with their customers, it is still important to come across as professional. Customers need to know they are making purchases from a credible business and not a random user simply pressuring other users to buy their products. A strong professional profile shows that the business is active in their industry which will, in turn, generate more serious leads.
Finally, social selling needs to be subtle, not pushy. Nobody wants to be bullied into making a purchase. It’s about building a healthy positive connection with customers, not a toxic relationship.
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