Social Selling in 13 Minutes a Day

Social Media doesn’t just belong to Marketing anymore.

Actions that a social media manager takes can affect all other departments, with Sales and Support receiving the majority of the impact; be sure to keep this in mind when monitoring your channels.

According to research from A Sales Guy, 72.6% of salespeople who incorporated social media into their process outperformed their colleagues. In addition, socially savvy reps beat their quotas 23% more often. We call this Social Selling.

72% of people who complain on Twitter expect a response within one hour. In the same study, 60% of respondents cited negative consequences to the brand if they didn’t receive timely Twitter responses. Twitter is the new phone for customer support, and these stats prove the importance of a quick response when someone has an issue with your brand.

Another study released by BRANDfog suggests that social CEOs are better leaders who can strengthen brands, build trust in products and services, demonstrate brand values, and communicate accountability -- all by simply being on a social network.

Monitoring your business’ social media presence is incredibly important. You need to respond to people talking about your brand and understand how people view your company. Social media isn’t this magical fairy dust that makes business leads come rushing in for your company. It’s hard work! It requires time and effort, often across multiple departments and among multiple employees.

72% OF PEOPLE WHO COMPLAIN ON TWITTER EXPECT A RESPONSE WITHIN AN HOUR.

Here are some simple ways to implement company-wide social selling... in just 13 minutes a day!

Your marketing team should create streams that specifically monitor:

• The activity of your different leads based on what product or service in which they are interested.
• The activity of thought leaders in your industry when they mention certain terms on social media.
  
• The conversation around the words and phrases that are core to your brand message and positioning.
  

HubSpot makes this easy with their Social tool inside the Marketing Platform. It allows you to easily Monitor and Publish to social media and provides detailed reporting for you to identify what content is resonating with your audience.

This saves so much time as you don't even need to log in to individual social media platforms; you can respond and interact directly from HubSpot.

Utilizing the HubSpot integration with contacts, your salespeople should create streams that specifically monitor:

• Their open leads’ conversations.
• Their “closed lost” leads’ mentions of certain terms.
• Their “closed won” leads to check in with them after the sale.

Your support team should create streams that specifically monitor:

• Questions or concerns people have about your products or services.
• Conversations your customers and leads are having about your products or services.
• Positive and negative feedback for your products or services.
  

Executives should create streams that specifically monitor:

• Conversations people are having about you and your executive team.
• Conversations your customers and leads are having about your products or services vs competitors' products or services.
• The activity of other executives in your industry when they mention certain terms on Twitter.

   

Executives should create streams that specifically monitor:

• Conversations people are having about you and your executive team.
• Conversations your customers and leads are having about your products or services vs competitors' products or services.
• The activity of other executives in your industry when they mention certain terms on Twitter.

Now that we’ve gone through why you should monitor, who should do the monitoring, and some basics for listening and responding, it’s time to determine next steps for your efforts. In anything you do, it’s important to set a goal for yourself, and monitoring social media should be no different.

Depending on which department owns your accounts, below are a few goals and metrics you can achieve through monitoring social media:

• Leads generated
• Industry trend tracking
• Thought leadership
• Interactions from influencers
• Interactions from detractors
• Competitive intelligence
• Revenue
• Qualified opportunities
• Opportunities won
• Daily or weekly touch points
• Brand mentions
• Sentiment
• Crisis management
• Conversations
• Response rate
• Resolved issues
• Customer happiness and delight
• Product feedback

If you’ve never set a goal for social media monitoring before, start by aligning your monitoring goals with your department’s goals. For example, if you’re monitoring from the Sales department, maybe you should set a goal for yourself to interact with 10 prospects per week on social media. Once you’ve achieved this goal and feel like you can go deeper, attach your goal to a revenue number or see how many deals you can close with social selling per month or per quarter. If you think you’d have more success setting your monitoring goals using a template, feel free to download our SMART goals template below.

Visit our HubSpot Partner page for more useful tips and tricks.