Social Selling: 5 Thing To Do to Get Started

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When it comes to the overall sales process, social selling using your social networks can be your best friend and you want it to be. Any help to get to the “yes, I’ll take two” is a great channel for you to cultivate. Social selling is defined as: the process of developing relationships as part of the sales process. Today this often takes place via social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, but can take place either online or offline.

Those who take the right approach to social selling continually generate positive results. And those who “hope something sticks” are not typically happy with where they end up.

Fortunately, social selling is not rocket science. It can be extremely simple and straightforward if you know what you are doing. Here are three ways to use social media to your advantage. At Dasheroo we take social selling serious and use all of these ideas when it comes to closing a deal.

Twitter Engagement for social selling

Using a tool like Hootsuite you can easily track what your customers are doing and ReTweet right from there!

Engage on Twitter

Once you set your sights on a target, you can use Twitter to search and find your target customer. The first steps to take:

  • Follow your target and their company (many times they have multiple Twitter accounts.)
  • Retweet their content.
  • Mention them in your own tweets and make sure you include their Twitter handle!

If your prospect is savvy, they’re looking at the emails they get from Twitter telling them who is Retweeting them and sharing their content. This will hopefully make them follow you back and take interest in what you’re putting out on Twitter.

Twitter is a powerful tool for those who are interested in social selling. You may be surprised at how much progress you can make with 140 characters or less.

Connect on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Company Connections

Target your customer and connect with them on LinkedIn through the “company” search.

With more than 400 million registered members, LinkedIn is the place to be for person to person selling. It is the professional network, providing the opportunity to put your social selling skills to the test. The key is that you need to be “connected” to a lot of folks in your industry and in your target audience. So:

  • Search the company name on LinkedIn
  • You’ll see who are your 1st-3rd degree connections
  • Connect with the appropriate people
  • Also, identify your target prospects using the advanced search in LinkedIn. It’s incredibly powerful.
  • Send the person a connect request.
  • Follow their company.
  • Send them an InMail if the connect OR upgrade to Premium and you have several InMails/month to send

We have had so much great luck on LinkedIn at Dasheroo. Check out 3 Easy Ways to Use The Power of LinkedIn Marketing.

Facebook for Business

Many people look at Facebook and see nothing more than pictures of cats, DIY projects, and happy families. On the contrary, while Facebook is a great way to stay in touch with friends and family, it can also be used as a P2P sales tool.

Getting started is as simple as liking the company page and liking, sharing and commenting on their posts. Over time, you can move the conversation from Facebook to another platform, such as LinkedIn or email.

Tools to Use

The best way to follow these people is using a tool like Hootsuite. They have a free version and you’ll be able to easily follow people on multiple social networks, see what they’re posting and react accordingly.

Google Alerts is a great way to keep tabs on what’s going on with the companies you follow. Then you can go ahead and post about their news.

Grow Your Audience

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Use Dasheroo dashboards when social selling to track your growth over time.

You don’t need a large following to achieve success with social selling, but it definitely helps. Be sure your audience is always growing, as this improves the likelihood of connecting with prospects who can one day be turned into paying customers.

With Twitter, for example, it is ideal for your follower count to increase day after day, month after month. This means more opportunity to sell. It also means more people listening to what you have to say.

What are your thoughts on P2P social selling? Are these tips enough for you to get started?

10 Amazing Uses for RSS Feeds in Your Business

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We just released the ability to use RSS feeds in Dasheroo. Sounds so 2007 doesn’t it? But the power of RSS for access to data is awesome. Yeah we’re geeks, but let’s not think of it as “RSS”, let’s think of it as not having to troll the web or click a million bookmarks to find the up-to-the minute data you’re looking for. So we decided to give you these 10 awesome uses for RSS feeds.

Let’s get ready to rumble with RSS!

1. Track your competition. Go to your competitor’s blog and see if they have an RSS link. If they do? Great. If they don’t you might want to try using the blog URL and adding a /rss to the end of it and see if that works when you create your Dasheroo Insight.

A graphic of: We like to see what the competition and industry is up to, compared to what we're writing about!

We like to see what the competition and industry is up to, compared to what we’re writing about!

 

2. Track your Tweets. If you’ve got someone doing your company Tweets for you and you want to keep a quick eye on what you’re saying it’s easy, especially if you have multiple Twitter accounts you want to monitor. Go to FeedTwit, sign in with your Twitter account, use that URL in Dasheroo.

3. Gather inspiration. If you write content for your company gather the URLs of the sites you visit to give you that information. For instance on Dasheroo’s Dataviz Friday we follow 538, Flowingdata and Information is Beautiful and republish their awesome content with backlinks to their site.

4. Track crazy nutty holidays. Perhaps you plan marketing campaigns around holidays, did you know that April 11th was Barbershop Quartet Day? You could run promotions around fun holidays you never heard of.

5. Track sports. Track the latest news from your favorite team, cuz let’s face it, it can’t be all about business!

A graphic of us tracking all of these amazing sites for inspiration on what to post, crazy holidays and ... hey, how did the SF Giants news get in there?

We track all of these amazing sites for inspiration on what to post, crazy holidays and … hey, how did the SF Giants news get in there?

 

6. Track the weather. Let’s say you count on business in another zip code or state. If local weather is preventing them from getting business done with you, that could have an affect on your sales. Go to the National Weather Service, at the bottom of the page choose the location you want to track the weather for. Then use the URL they give you for your Dasheroo Weather Insight! Make sure you’re diversifying your selling or your advertising from those locations.

7. Track Google Alerts. If you’ve got some alerts set up that mention you or your company you can get them into a feed. Just select RSS Feed in your Google Alert settings instead of email, click on the RSS icon and you’ll get URL you’ll need to put into your Dasheroo RSS Insight.

8. Track your mentions. If you use a service like Mention.com or Trackur, when you set up your alert, go to settings, manage your alerts and click on the RSS icon. Then take that URL and create a Dasheroo Insight for that.

9. Track your own blog. If you’ve got someone writing blog content for your company you might want to share it with everyone who is looking at your dashboards. Then your sales or customer service team knows what is being said when your readers ask about it.

10. Food. And because it can’t be all about business and sports, how about best recipes of the day! Food Network has a plethora of them! Use http://blog.foodnetwork.com/fn-dish/tag/best-recipes/rss as your URL for your feed.

We're hungry now!

We’re hungry now!

There ya have it. Get on in there and have a blast with RSS, we are!