Episode 218: 5 Don’ts (and 5 Do’s) for Social Selling Content

Bob Woods  00:00

A big welcome to you my B2B sales and marketing peeps to Making Sales Social Live, Coming to you from the Social Sales Link Studios. I’m Bob Woods, the LinkedIn Sherpa. Brynne is off today as she’s not feeling that well. 

Intro  00:17

Welcome to Making Sales Social Live, as we share LinkedIn and Social Selling Training Strategies and Tips that will have an immediate impact on your business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, every week, Making Sales Social Live! This is the recorded version of our weekly Making Sales Social Live Show. 

Bob Woods  00:40

So let’s get right into things. Buyers use content in researching their potential purchase decisions. In many cases, this happens before we, as salespeople, even know they’re in the market for our products and services. Let’s toss out three statistics to help prove our point here. First to come from LinkedIn. 78% of salespeople use social media to outsell their peers, that in and of itself should tell you “Hey, I shouldn’t be doing this.” Number 270 5% of b2b buyers and 84% of C-level or VP-level executives use social media to make purchasing decisions. 

And our third stat comes from CSO insights. 31% of B2B professionals say that social selling allowed them to build deeper relationships with their clients. And as people who are in either straight B2B or if you’re a professional B2C type of person, if you’re in banking, or if you’re in financial services or real estate, or you know those types of things. Very very important because I know that we would all like to have that deeper relationship with at least a third of the people whom we are talking. 

So these stats and trust me, there are many more out there show why content is and always will be one of the main drivers behind this whole concept of social selling. This whole social selling thing, you’re attracting people with your content to your message. So you can begin the sales process with a great quality conversation that’s not salesy in nature. We don’t like salesy people, I know I certainly don’t. So, before we get started in the nitty gritty, let’s frame what good content is, from an overall standpoint. For social selling, it’s pretty simple. 

You need to engage your audience of prospects before they know they need you, so that you can start the conversation with them. And you’re the one who’s educating them and leading them to the next step, as our statistics just proved. So for example, if we’re talking about, you know, what we do here at Social Sales Link, and this is not to be salesy, it’s just because it’s the easiest example that I can come up with, so we’re talking about prospecting on LinkedIn. A lot of the content that we’ll probably do, and we do do, is sharing about, getting started on LinkedIn, how to connect with the right people on LinkedIn.

How to use LinkedIn, specifically, in certain circumstances, things like that, especially how to connect with the right people on LinkedIn, because that’s what they’re doing before their prospecting, potentially, that’s where we live. That’s what we want to teach people. So in your position, what you need to do is you need to look at what’s happening on their end, before they need you. Who were they buying from? What other types of content might they be researching at a stage before they reach out to contact you? 

Once you figure that out. And yeah, you do need to figure that out without a doubt, you actually need to start planning for and developing that content. So there are good ways to do it. And there are bad ways to do it. Let’s go into our specific examples of content that you shouldn’t do and what you should do instead. So our first one is, and we see it all the time. Purely promotional posts, where you’re aware, someone is out there saying, “Hey, I’m me, I’m selling this, contact me.” Obviously, you don’t want to do that because it doesn’t really address anything. What the potential prospect who you’re trying to attract is actually going through. 

What you do instead is you really lean into exactly what we just discussed, content that creates curiosity and gets prospects thinking differently and that’s key thinking differently about their current situation. Because if they’re not thinking about their Current situation? And if they’re not thinking differently about it, why are they going to buy anything from you? If they’re locked into doing the same thing over and over again, wanting different results? Like the old code says, Why are they even going to do it, you need to get them to think differently. When they think differently, their minds are going to open up to new possibilities and things like that. 

Let’s just, you can’t just keep on doing what you’re doing, and just thinking everything’s going to be fine, which actually gets into, and comments are going to be a little bit slow for me to respond to because I’m alone. I’m trying to do like five things at once. But I’m going to try to get to as many as possible. So Stephen Farber, one of our friends here, is 8020 is the 8020 world when it comes to sales, focus posts versus educational posts. Does it make sense? So with those types of things, what I suggest you do potentially, is if you have a company page, whether it’s your own business, and you have a business for your company page, or if you work for a larger company that actually has its own company page.

And that’s a little more product-focused, go ahead and reshare those posts, but then in your post, add that, you know, add that customer-facing message, add that thing, that idea or whatever you want to call it, where you can bring out some of your ideas, your thought leadership type of content to whatever that initial post was, that’s the way I suggest that you do it. If for some reason you don’t have that company page, every once in a while, yeah, you may want to do that. But even in those posts, I would most strongly suggest that you do add value to it that you do think about what the customer or what your potential customer is going to get out of this as a result of reading that piece, and not just a “Hey, we’ve got a new product.” 

Go into maybe a potential use case behind the product or something like that, you know, something where people can actually really get something out of it that they didn’t know before. And again, potentially gets them thinking differently about their current situation. So number two is polls. So we just did an episode on polls, poorly thought-out polls really aren’t what you want to do, you really need to have polls with a purpose. So really make sure that you’re asking questions that resonate with your audience so that they’ll want to engage with it. And you can even create further content based on those polls, it’s still great. They may not get quite the organic reach that they used to.

But you can still use them to get into people’s LinkedIn, messaging, inbox, and things like that, to really, really discover what your customers are thinking. And then you can even develop further content out of that. Now, I’m not going to go into real specifics here, because Episode 214, which is, depending on where this falls in the actual podcast, will be either the immediate podcast before or the one just before this episode. But in episode 214 Brynne and I really delve into the polls and how they can benefit your social selling and content efforts. So number three, we’re going to talk about text posts here in particular, Now, text posts still do well. 

But if they’re just like long, and Toki, and especially if they don’t have a graphic constant attached to it, I mean, look at it like this, are you really going to want to read that long talkie post that, quite frankly, may not even be interesting in the first place. And when it’s long, and it’s very talky, it may be the most interesting content in the world. But if nobody reads it, it’s not really going to be that interesting to people. That’s why we strongly recommend using video instead of just text-only posts. The video still does well. People still like to be able to watch the person on the other end. And you can demonstrate a lot more personality. 

You can really connect with people because you’re proverbial looking at them eye to eye even though it’s not a FaceTime type of thing or or whatever, when people can actually see you delivering your message. It’s just so much more powerful. And then remembering everything that we talked about when it comes to The actual content, you could do some really, really interesting stuff in videos. So even nowadays, don’t sleep on video, There are so many people who are still not doing it, you really need to be doing video. So number four, is, has to do with one of the hottest topics out there right now has to do with generative AI and Chat GPT. 

So a lot of people are using this to develop content to develop ideas behind content and everything else, one of the worst things you can do would be to copy and paste something directly out of Chat GPT and paste it into a post and use that as your post because it’s not going to sound like you, you need to sound like yourself in these posts. Because if you sound robotic in your posts, and then somewhere and you do end up having a conversation with someone, and you’re very animated, and are just a delight to be around, there’s going to be a disconnect there. 

So you really need to make sure that anything that you put into a LinkedIn or social selling-related posts on any platform, it doesn’t really even need to be LinkedIn, whether it’s Instagram threads, ex Twitter, what the heck’s going on there or whatever, make sure that it’s in your voice. And there’s a really easy way to do this, whatever you want to copy and paste out, read that out loud. First, read that piece of text out loud, if it doesn’t sound like you rewrite it, so that it sounds like you, before you post it, read it out loud again, just to make sure that it sounds like you. 

Because you know when it comes to when you’re dealing with like chatbots and things like that, you know, when you’re dealing with a chatbot, even though it may not even though the company may not say that this is a chatbot, when it’s a chatbot you don’t want to be a chatbot in the minds of your audience of prospects, you want to be yourself. So please, please, please do not do a direct copy and paste out of Chat GPT, you will have the little bit of extra time that it takes to actually read not redevelop. But to kind of fine-tune the content so that it sounds like you will pay off in the future, I guarantee it. 

So the last one and there’s always been talk about this on LinkedIn specifically is what I call that selfie, only content or the Facebook of vacation that used to happen with LinkedIn. It’s kind of going away. Now the LinkedIn algorithm is definitely starting to point away from that type of thing. Now, instead of doing just the selfie, only content where you’re in front of a building that’s like, “Hey, I’m in front of LinkedIn headquarters look at me Look at me, weave in personal stories into those selfies.” So what I mean by personal is actually personal slash professional. 

So you’re taking a personal moment, and you’re bringing something professional into it. And that obviously can be like a wide variety of things. But if you know if, for example, let’s say I was at LinkedIn very recently, I learned so much when I was there, When it comes to collaborative articles, I actually did a post based on that with some selfies from there. But then within the actual post, I weaved in thought leadership, and educational content about collaborative articles. And that post worked because I was actually educating people about that. You can do that type of thing with selfies. 

But you can’t just be posting Instagram-style types of things. And you know, “Hey, this is great food or whatever.” If you were at a place that had great food, but you learn something professionally from it. That’s a potential post. So take the extra step. And just don’t do selfie-only content. I really think that that’s very important. Because you do want to show personality, you do want to show a little bit of yourself because let’s face it in the sales process, when you’re talking and having conversations with people, you are sharing portions of yourself within those conversations. 

Just take that type of thing over to LinkedIn, you don’t want to do you know TMI too much information in anything professional, at least in my opinion. Some people do that. That’s fine for them. I’m not like that. But I do want to share certain elements of my personality out there just like what I’m doing right now on the podcast. When you do that you just appear to be a much more human person while at the same human person. That makes sense, doesn’t it? But yeah, much more of a well-rounded person rather than that Chat GPT copy-and-paste stuff that some of you may be doing. 

Don’t do that. This all goes back to personality. This all goes back to the fact that you know, you’re going to be dealing with people, and they should know what type of person you are ahead of time, at least in a professional sense with that, we’re not going to leave you and I was going to say we’re going to leave, but we’re not going to leave yet. Instead, I want to quickly talk about the scourge of LinkedIn. And that’s direct, blatant pitching in messaging. And in content, we’ve all seen it. In fact, as of late, I’ve been getting an especially alarming number of cold attempts to have a sales conversation. 

And they all turned me off their arms, they have no idea what I do, there have been several that even have been working for a company that’s a direct competitor of ours. And they mentioned it, it’s like, I don’t know where they’re getting the information. Obviously, it’s all wrong. It’s all bad. Don’t do it. LinkedIn and social selling aren’t about cold contacting. It’s all about developing relationships, you do that by getting referrals, commenting on their content, when they share, reacting and adding to comments when they come through on your content.

And that’s especially important, there are so many different ways to do this without being that stereotypical finger-snapping salesperson who’s only interested in closing another deal sign on the dotted line right here. Once you’re done, you’re done, I don’t care. You don’t want to be that person, you want to engage them, really find out what their needs are, and then have content ready that helps them on their buyer’s journey. You’ve got to get them to lean in and go. Yeah, that’s interesting. I really want to learn more about that. And then teach them something new. 

As I said before, “When you teach them something new, their mind expands and they want to learn even more, it creates in their mind that you’re a thought leader and a subject matter in your industry.” And let’s face it, buyers want to purchase from people who know what the heck they’re talking about. And I literally just had this happen recently at a restaurant. So you go into a restaurant, and either nothing looks good, or everything looks good. And you’re having trouble deciding. So what you do is, you ask the wait person. What they think about certain things. 

At that point, they become the experts. And they’re, even though you’re in the restaurant and everything else, they are selling you on what’s on their menu, and you look at them as an expert. Same thing with us. Except obviously, we’re in a little bit of a different position, because we don’t necessarily have people in the restaurant already. But still, it’s the same basic idea. So there’s all different types of content that can lead them on their way in their buying experience. And we actually have an older ebook, so this isn’t anything new. And you may have downloaded this already. 

But it comes in really well with this conversation. It’s called the seven types of content sales professionals need for the buyer’s journey. It does what it says. And it’s even tuned for the sales funnel. So we’ve been talking primarily about top-of-the-funnel types of stuff. But this ebook actually has suggestions about what you can do for the top of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, and even the end of the funnel, you can download it we have a forwarding link at social saleslink.com/funnelcontent, funnel content is all one-word socialsaleslink.com/funnelcontent, funnel content, all one word, no capitals, or weird characters or anything like that. 

Hope you can definitely download it. A lot of people commented on the first time we released it, and a lot of people got a lot out of it. Hopefully, you’ll download it, and you’ll get a lot out of it too. So with that, thanks again for joining us on making sales social live. If you’re with us live on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. I know who knows what’s going on there right now. We do this every week. So keep an eye out for our live sessions. 

If you’re listening to us on our podcast, in other words, recorded and you haven’t subscribed already, go ahead and hit that subscribe or follow button to access all of our previous shows and to be alerted when new ones drop. If you’d like more info on our podcast in particular, you can go to socialsaleslink.com/podcast. So we do two shows weekly, we do this one making sales social live and then our Making Sales Social Interview series, where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business and many more areas. 

So I want to thank everyone for joining. I really appreciate it especially as I’m flying solo today, which is cool. I really like doing this, Looking forward to have, Brynne back. And so when you are out and about make sure that your sales are social, and have a great week everybody bye.

Outro  20:01

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