5 Great Social Media Selling Tools to Add to Your Arsenal in 2019

Social media selling refers to receiving business directly from platforms such as Facebook or LinkedIn, as opposed to simply increasing brand awareness or performing customer service. It leverages social networks for more than sharing photos or catching up with old college buddies, and when done correctly, it can be a lucrative source of business. The challenge is most people on social media are not necessarily in the frame of mind to buy anything, unlike visitors to your website from a search engine who obviously show some buying intent. People on social media are there mostly to express opinions or browse interesting or funny posts, so a different approach is needed. Social media selling tools therefore tend to specialize in: 1. Strengthening relationships with followers 2. Identifying potential prospects by analyzing user activity Here are 5 excellent apps and services salespeople should have in their arsenal of social media selling tools which accomplish 1 and 2 above.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

For B2B sales, Sales Navigator is a top social media selling tool, and its pricing of $1,200 annually reflects it. It recommends leads and identifies key stakeholders; syncs to Salesforce; has advanced search functions; and provides deeper insights – all without being overly complicated. Pro tip:After setting filters and performing a search, find look-a-likes of any potential lead by clicking the three dots to the right of the listing and choose “View similar” from the pop-up menu.              

Reachable

Reachable is an interesting product which is not only valuable as a social media selling tool, but good for sales teams who want to dip their toes into ABM (account-based marketing) without a huge investment. The way Reachable works is that it takes all the contacts from each member of an organization and pools them together in order to analyze potential connections into a target account. Each member’s contacts remain private, but strong connections with a particular prospect are ranked higher and highlighted, allowing one member to ask another for an introduction or information about the prospect. Often, it pays to send a salesperson with the most connections to try to win an account, and Reachable helps achieve this. Pro tip: Connect your Facebook, Gmail, LinkedIn and more to illuminate even more connections.

Leadfeeder

Speaking of account-based marketing, one of the critical pieces in the ABM tech stack is a means to identify whenever a target company visits your website. This allows your salespeople to immediately reach out via email, social media, phone call, or other appropriate method – even if a contact form has not been filled out. Leadfeeder accomplishes this by tying into your Google Analytics as well as your LinkedIn account to reveal visiting companies, and also identify the pages they visited with a list of contacts who work there. Salespeople can be alerted of visits from targeted accounts via email, and leads are automatically sent to your CRM as well. As of this writing, plans start at $53 for 100 leads per month, scaling higher as needed. Very reasonable! Pro tip: When a company you’ve never heard of before visits your website, quickly review which pages they’ve visited and time spent to determine whether they are worth contacting right away.

Crystal

Crystal is an add-in which permits you to perform prospecting tasks, such as crafting emails and LinkedIn messages to your buyers, more effectively by using psychology. It does this by giving you automatic advice on what type of tone and language to use when addressing a specific prospect, and even tips on how to sell him or her.                 Crystal gets its data from prospects’ social media profiles or text samples of their writing to make assumptions about their preferred communication style. Armed with this data, you can tailor messaging and apply the best approach as if you knew a buyer for years. Pro tip: Take the $49 personality assessment to get insights into your own personality.

Hootsuite

The final of the social media selling tools on this list is Hootsuite, a social media scheduler and management tool which makes publishing to various social accounts easy. Some of the key features: · Schedule posts for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, WordPress, Instagram, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and more from a single interface. · Discover new content to share with a built-in recommendation engine. · Monitor conversations across social channels to discover opportunities. · Build your own content library for your team to tap into when posting. · Measure ROI and other KPIs by social channel to track effectiveness. Pro tip: Use Hootsuite’s geolocation search to filter conversations people are having about a specific subject within a certain area, such as your local neighborhood. If you need help implementing a social media selling strategy, we would be happy to provide a referral to one of our strategic partners we work closely with, just drop us a line.