What is social selling and how to measure the results

Due to the drastic increment in social media platforms and how easy it is to access them through any device, we've got more profiles getting grouped by socioeconomic level, birthplace, age or gender. As platforms have been evolving, our communication through them and the way we consume products and services has changed too. 

Years ago, sales were achieved traditionally that consisted of door to door offering products to possible shoppers. This method took a step forward when the telephonic era arrived, and they gave every salesman a telephone and a phone book, with this sales strategy the sales people would be in charge of calling every possible client to ensure a sale.

Nowadays, the way we interact to sell has changed. A study made by  Harvard Business Review revealed that 90% of people in charge of a company or business don't answer phone calls or even open their emails, meanwhile sales people assert that possible clients only respond to brief social media messages. 

What is social selling?

It's the process where we investigate, interact and connect with our prospects and clients through different social media such as: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or Google+. Create a link or an authentic relationship with our target market through our digital content. 

Through this strategy we can give our brand more reliability because we are not only offering a product or a service, we are also worried about our client's and prospect's interests.

Social selling is not for everyone, if you've got in mind to generate clients fast or that your brand is going to get positioned immediately this way of selling is not going to work for you because it needs time and constant effort to connect with your target audience.

Why is social selling important?

The information obtained shows us that people that apply this method obtain long term results. An investigation states that the most successful sales agents are the ones that close 51% of the deals compared to their rivals, and they assert that social media is more important to succeed when closing a deal. 

The sales agents that apply social selling have increased their pipeline volume 18%and increased 21% over the ones that didn't implement it.

Advices to improve your social selling

Improve your social media profile 

Our efforts won't do much if our social media profile is not updated or has little information. You should ensure that all the parameters are filled.

Distribute content to strengthen or build your credibility

There are a lot of ways to establish contact through social media. One of them is by sharing quality content. This is not about just uploading content in bulk without rhyme or reason. We are talking about sharing things that appeal to your clients or prospects, common themes, etc. 

Put attention to the comments 

Monitoring your social media comments will give you a better scenery of the content that your prospects enjoy, and we'll be informed about the topics that create a connection.

Share success stories 

Success cases are a very precious way to create reliability. Approximately 92% of people trust a friend's recommendation. And 70% of people trust a person they don't know. Potential clients tend to trust more in other people's direct experiences with a product or a service they already consumed than what a brand says about their own products.

Pay attention to your clients 

Nowadays, clients take social media and messenger services as the main medium to establish contact with companies. In social media, it is easier to visualize people's criticisms of your company, especially when there's complaints or discontent.

Distinguish in which moment to transfer from social media

If you already created a connection or a solid link and want to close the sale, you'll have to leave social media and transfer the conversation to another site, whether you propose a phone call or a visit to continue chatting. This will help us identify the challenge better, knowing what is needed and having better odds on closing the sale.

How to measure your social selling performance

The network's growth 

This is a simple social selling metric, but it gives us a general view of how much volume is reaching the target audience. We have to take into consideration that when we generate any connection: likes, retweets or people sharing our content. We generate conversations and these are key points, so don't lose sight of how you grow in different social networks. 

Inbound relationships

A connection or inbound relationship is a way to measure how much are we growing in the network, not only the likes or clicks that the website receives. The important thing is the sales that are generated based on the growth. The inbound connection means that people can find you easily either through recommendations, through a common contact or through a post that has been shared on a platform. 

Content's engagement rate

The point here is to become an information net for the audience, this will help to see ourselves as experts in the topic and give more credibility to our company.

We have to define which is the best content for our readers and based on that create different content analyzing these topics. We have to consider which information about your product or service is relevant for them and how this is going to help them reach their goals.

Message response statistics 

Having low levels of response in this point indicates that we have to put more effort in the way we open a virtual conversation with the prospects.

Message response statistics are crucial to know if we attract the prospect's attention well before we approach with more direct and personal messages.

Clicks on links

This metric helps to identify how the target audience relates to the content during the link building. If people are clicking our websites gives us an idea of how involved they are with our content. A high statistic in this section lets us see if the people are liking the content we have to give them. In other words, if people like to read what you have to share.

Income obtained 

At last the reason to make all of this is to generate money, this metric becomes one of the most important because if we don't generate enough income we'll probably go out of business. Nowadays, it is much easier to know how much sales we generated through social media because establishing conversations with clients is much easier, and we can know how they arrived at the communication channel.

As a conclusion, social selling became a way to enter a medium and long term relationship because it requires our daily effort and to be patient with the work generated. This won't bring clients overnight. The content must link clients and businesses through the digital content. Once you obtain this link, you'll have enough information to know how to close that sale. It's important to make use of the metrics to keep measuring the progress obtained through this sales strategy and know how well is it going with the work we've made.