How To Build Your Social Selling System with LinkedIn and Twitter

Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. I'm Mike Moran, and I'm the founder at Biznology and a senior strategist at Converzion, Revealed Context, and Solo Segment. I'm the author of Do It Wrong Quickly and co-author of Search Engine Marketing Inc. and Outside-In Marketing. I'm a veteran of IBM, managing groups at IBM for 8 years and retiring from IBM in 2008 as a distinguished engineer. Today you'll be hearing from Mindy Rosser, who will present How to Build Your Social Selling System with LinkedIn and Twitter. But before we start, we need to recognize our sponsors. Barnraisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. The Conversion Company, predictable, repeatable growth, boosts new business by getting in front of the right people. Geris Corp, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. Mountaintop Data, a B2B intelligence marketing company providing marketing lists as well as data cleaning, data appending, and data maintenance services. GaggleAmp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. Try GaggleAmp for free today. SoloSegment, your one-stop shop for targeted B2B content marketing techniques, including website search and website personalization. As we wait for more attendees to join, let's review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and we'll email you that link later this week. During our presentation, you can use BigMarker to chat with your fellow attendees. Just type in the chat tab. There you can also see tweets about our webinar. Feel free to tweet with the hashtag #BizKnowWebinar. If you have a question to ask our speaker, click the Q&A tab. I'll select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to Mindy. Lastly, in the handouts tab, you can find the PDF of today's presentation. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. Mindy Rosser is one of our Biznology authors and is a social media strategist who specializes in helping brands, businesses, and people look great online. As a digital native, she has spent nearly a decade working with the B2B and B2C companies developing and implementing strategic marketing programs. She also consults for The Conversion Company, an online marketing firm helping B2B companies and executives use social media to drive dramatic business results. So if you've ever struggled with making social selling work for your business, this is the webinar for you. Mindy, take it away.

Hi everyone, I'm excited to be here with you and to talk about social selling. So feel free to add any questions you have. I'm happy to answer them, as he mentioned, at the end of the webinar. And you can also follow up with me via email, so if something pops into your brain, it's Mindy@MindyRosser.com. So you can jot that down and I'll connect with you there. So let's go ahead and jump in and get started. So I know a lot of you have had this feeling when you hear the word social selling. It's like, what is social selling? We know what social media marketing is, but we also do not understand the difference between social selling and social media marketing. And I feel like this is something that a lot of us struggle with and we want to do social selling or we hear people talking about social selling, but we just don't get it. And you're not alone. A lot of us at felt this way. I felt this way until a few years ago when I started really digging into social selling for my clients. And it's, it definitely is a little bit challenging to understand and kind of break down and understand the differences. So basically with social media marketing, you are building brand awareness. You are trying to share tweets, you're sharing status updates, you are posting to your company page. So a lot of it is geared towards getting website traffic. It's making your brand look good. Versus social selling, which is much more on the sales side of the spectrum where you're trying to connect with your audience more in a one-to-one way just using social media. So I hope that makes a little bit more sense. And many sales and marketing leaders are really trying to dig into how to design, develop, and execute these types of programs because social selling programs impact the bottom line more so than a traditional social media marketing program. So trying to find the right tips and tricks and what actually works on social media is a challenge for a lot of people. So we're going to dive into that a little bit today. And here's what's in store for us. We are going to push the slide. There we go. So by the end of this webinar, I want you to feel really comfortable understanding what social selling is and what it's not. I want you to feel comfortable with your personal brand on LinkedIn and Twitter. So you'll really understand how that fits into your social selling Program. And then we're going to talk a little bit about developing your social selling system, because without a system, all of this doesn't really matter because we have to continually execute if we want things to work on social media. All right. So first, what is social selling for? We talked a little bit about this, but I want to hear your perspective. So what do you think social selling is for? Go ahead and type your answers into the chat. And I'm going to look and see what some of you are thinking social selling is for. How would you use social selling? What do you think it's good for when it comes to your business or what you are trying to accomplish? Increase sales, creating deeper relationships. I agree. Trust. That's a really, really good one. And I think a lot of people overlook that. Finding prospects but not closing them. Yes, it's often we are trying to find them but not closing. Yep. Leveraging social channels to reach audiences, getting awareness of you as a person. That's a really good one too. And your qualifications, engaging people, personalized contact. Yep. Getting people to think of you first and branding. Oh, these are all awesome answers. And I think these are all different components of social selling and growing prospects that you need to meet. Yes, all good answers. And I think we're all on the same page when it comes to what social selling is for. And these are all different aspects that we can explore with social selling. Okay, great. All right. So about— there are a lot of statistics out there about social selling, and one of them is this, and this is 75% of B2B buyers use social media to research vendors. And even if you're not a B2B company and you are in a B2C business, your buyers are still looking you up on social media. And you probably notice that when you go to your LinkedIn profile and see that a number of people have viewed you and maybe you don't know them. So people are watching. You can't get as much visibility on who's viewed you on Twitter, but on LinkedIn you can kind of get a better idea of who's looking you up and which people are— you're popping up on their radar. So if you are not engaging and active on social media, especially on the channels that matter to your audience, and in a B2B setting, those channels would be LinkedIn and Twitter for the most part. Instagram is kind of coming along, but it's not quite there yet for most of our clients. So you are missing a huge opportunity to connect with these buyers and make a great impression if you're not there and you're not active. So let's talk about how to get into that. So what exactly is social selling? So here's a short definition for you. It's basically using social media to connect with your prospects and buyers. It's really that simple. It's not necessarily just raising awareness. So I feel like awareness does play into social selling a bit. It's more about that relationship there. So marketing does precede sales. And it's no different online. When people see our messaging and people come to know, like, and trust you, then they start making inquiries about your services, about your products. They want to learn more about you. They're more open to a phone call, collaboration, and other opportunities. And this is the starting point for a sales conversation. So social selling is not closing people. It's actually like getting to that conversation. So I do want to clarify that a bit. So when you are sharing consistent insights on social media, These insights should be what your intended clientele are looking for. So when they see you sharing them, they are like, oh, their radar goes up and they want to connect with you because you sound like you know what you're talking about and can solve their problem and are an expert in your area. And so I feel like with social selling, it is a bit of a mindset shift. So it's different than the social media marketing as we discussed earlier. It's approaching social media with the intention of connecting with buyers, not just getting your message out there. So that's something to remember is you are trying to get in front of buyers. So that's why getting salespeople involved in social selling and not just leaving it to the marketing department is really important because you need to work together and sales and marketing teams need to be aligned on the social selling program if you want to see those results. So social media marketing again is more about your online presence, raising awareness, and it helps your social selling program. But social selling is more on moving the customers through the buyer's journey. and working towards the sale. All right. And I like this quote from John Ferreira. I think most of you have probably heard of Nimble. It's a really great CRM tool that you can use that also hooks up to your social channels. So I like this because it really does come back to, we're trying to help our customers solve their problem and meet their needs. And social media is a great way to do that for most of us and the businesses that we are in. All right, so we're going to talk next about designing your personal brand. This is one of my favorite sections because I feel like personal branding is often overlooked in social selling. You've probably been on the receiving end of messages that you've received on LinkedIn or Twitter, and they sound really spammy. And you go to that person's profile and you look at their profile and try to figure out who this person is. Why are they talking to you? What right do they have to be in your inbox and your direct messages? So let's talk about making yourself look really good on LinkedIn and Twitter so people will trust you, because as somebody else brought up earlier, trust is critical when it comes to social selling. So first we're going to talk about your LinkedIn profile. So if you are near your computer or your phone and you want to look it up, go ahead and go to your LinkedIn profile because we are going to talk through the different sections on your LinkedIn profile, though I'm not going to put them up on the screen. But First, I want you to think about your LinkedIn profile, and I want you to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10. And if you feel comfortable sharing it, go ahead and put it in the chat. And we are going to see if we can up that number by the end of this section, and you will feel confident in moving forward. So what do you think your LinkedIn profile is on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the worst, 10 being the absolute best? 5. Okay, that's good. Decent. 7. That's really good. 6. Good. So we're seeing some good numbers here. So it looks like a lot of you are pretty confident with your LinkedIn profile, but you probably want to look at some ways to improve slightly. So we're gonna talk through this. 6s, 8s.

Good.

Okay, awesome. So let's talk through our LinkedIn profiles. We're gonna start at the top. First, what you're gonna want to focus on is your background photo. So a lot of people overlook this. You want this to stand out and reflect your business and what you're doing. For my profile, you'll notice I have like some books, computers, and it kind of looks kind of marketing-like. It looks like I work from home. So a little bit of a remote worker feel. And that's kind of the feel to my brand. And if you go to my website, this is the header that I have on my website as well. So everything looks very consistent. So people, when they land here and they've been elsewhere and seen me elsewhere online, they will recognize, oh yeah, that's Mindy. Okay. I remember seeing her somewhere. Even if they don't make that recognition consciously, they're making it subconsciously. So then next you're going to want to focus on your tagline here, which you can kind of see it's a little bit blurry in this photo, but I have systemized social selling and social marketing programs for B2B companies on LinkedIn and Twitter to accelerate sales cycles. So I'm gonna break down that recipe there. So it's basically the first part, the first section is what I actually do, and then for what type of companies or prospects that I'm trying to serve. And where's that's on LinkedIn and Twitter. And why I want to accelerate sales cycles. That's like a good formula to follow for your LinkedIn tagline. You have 120 characters with spaces. So I used, I think I used every single one of mine. So it does take a while to tweak this headline. And if you need help with that, I'm happy to brainstorm ideas after the webinar too. You can always reach out to me, but that's really important because people will search for you. And if they're looking for social selling or social marketing or B2B companies or Twitter, LinkedIn, when they're searching on LinkedIn, they're going to find me because that's in my headline. So it's really good for SEO on LinkedIn. The next section is the first company that you have listed and then also your education. And you'll notice with my education, I listed something that's nontraditional, the Seth Godin Alt MBA program, and you can do that. So if you've done a workshop or a course or something that's educational, you can list that under your education and have it pop up here because for my clientele, doing this program is very beneficial and it gives me a lot of credibility. So that's why I have it listed there. So you can kind of play with that a little bit. You don't have to just stick to the norms when it comes to the education section. And then as you scroll down, you're going to see your summary section. In this, you have 2,000 characters and you want to use all of them. And this includes your spaces. So I like to start with the call to action, which is amplify social selling, your social selling. And I want people to understand that that's what they can do and that's what they can learn from me. And so this section is very directed towards my audience. I'm thinking of it almost as solving their problem in a couple paragraphs versus talking about me. Traditionally, people will use their LinkedIn profiles to talk about themselves and what they've done and all their accomplishments. And maybe that's working for you, but maybe that's not. And maybe you should make it focused on your prospects. And if I would recommend you do that, if you are using your LinkedIn profile for social selling purposes versus trying to find a job. So I list also some key social selling tactics for people to get started, how they can connect with me, and then some of my specialties. And then if you can include some media, which would be anything like a PDF or links or articles you've written or videos you've done, webinars, include those there. I like to list like 4 to 6 of them. And then as you scroll down, I know we've got to move quickly through this. So you want to publish regularly on LinkedIn Pulse and whether that's quarterly, some people like to do it monthly. That's good because then people can see that you are regularly posting and that you are a thought leader in your space. And then also engaging with status updates. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. In your experience sections where the job— jobs typically go, you're going to want to focus a little bit more on what you do and what your companies do. So you'll want to focus on the mission of your company, how their offerings affect their clients and their prospects, and then also a little bit more about what you do at those specific companies. And then by the time you get down to your education, I feel like those sections are not as important as the top sections, but do pay specific attention to this section if your education does give you credibility in your space. So make sure you have any workshops or degrees or any of that listed here, and also include some media in this section too. It kind of gives your profile a little bit more pizzazz, and it makes people feel really comfortable and trusting you because it looks like you've done a lot and you're willing to showcase what you've done. If you've done any volunteer experience, please put that in there. That does also increase your credibility. Credibility and your trustworthiness, especially if it's related to what you're doing in your day job. So if, for instance, I'm doing, I did some social media work for some nonprofits. So I included that here in my profile and that gives me a little bit of credibility and shows that I like to give back to the community. And then when you get to your featured skills and endorsements, you have 50 of these to use. And I would recommend that you use all of them. And even if you haven't been endorsed by somebody, I would still add all of the keywords and skills that you'd like to be known for. And when people search, they will find you from these. So make sure to list all of your top 50 here in the featured skills and endorsements section. And then recommendations, these you will probably have to ask people to give you. So they're a little trickier to get and to flesh out. But if you can get recommendations for your most recent work and some maybe from prior clients, that would be awesome. It gives you a lot of credibility. And because the way recommendations are featured on LinkedIn, they're, they're kind of, they used to be hidden and you had to click to open them and now they are open so you can see them and people will scroll through and look at your recommendations. The other sections under accomplishments used to be a little more prominent on LinkedIn and they're not so much anymore. So I wouldn't worry too much about those sections. So that kind of gives you an overview of LinkedIn. I also have a LinkedIn profile template that I'm happy to share with you afterwards. So I'll follow up with that if you want to revamp your LinkedIn profile kind of based on what we talked about. All right, let's hop into Twitter because I know we're getting short on time here. So when it comes to Twitter, you're going to want your Twitter profile to match your LinkedIn profile in a lot of respects. It's going to be a little bit different, but still similar. So if you want to hop over to your Twitter profile, we'll talk through this one briefly. It's a little bit shorter, not as much to go through here. And you're going to want to make sure your header matches what you have on LinkedIn. You want your profile picture also to match what you have on LinkedIn. Make sure it's a nice clear headshot. And then with your Twitter bio, it can be a little more fun than LinkedIn. So show a little bit more personality. I include a little, a bit of my personal interests, causes that I'm passionate about, and I also use a few hashtags that are woven into my Twitter bio to give me a little bit more searchability when people are looking for topics I'm really passionate about and interested in. And then with your tweets, it's a good best practice to tweet 1 to 3 times a day at least. For a lot of people, I would recommend more. And you want these to be a mix of stuff that you've written. You want this to be good content that you've read. And you also want to do some retweeting of other people's content too. So it should be a nice mix of content related to what's in your bio. So include some of your personal interests. It's not quite as formal as LinkedIn. And make sure sure to also include a lot of your specialties and things that would build credibility with your prospects and your target audience. So that's Twitter. And let's move on to developing your social selling system. So now that we've addressed how to make a great LinkedIn profile, a good Twitter profile, what do we need to do next? And I love checklists, so I'm not sure if you like them as much as I do, but I feel like they're really helpful for moving forward on social selling programs. So I have 3 checklists that you will see here and you can look at them later too. We'll go through them briefly. So first part of social selling is listening. If you're not listening to your audience, then you are not going to know what to say. You're not going to know what they want to hear from you. So make sure that you're listening and not just blasting on LinkedIn and Twitter and across your other social media channels. So I spend about 10 or 15 minutes going through LinkedIn, going through Twitter, and listening to conversations that are happening. I do this by following hashtags and keywords. A good tool that's free for Twitter is TweetDeck, and that's a great tool if you are just trying to listen to what's going on, and I highly recommend you get that tool. For LinkedIn, you're actually going to have to dive into some LinkedIn groups, probably scroll through your status updates field, and kind of poke around LinkedIn a little bit more, so there is not a great tool like a TweetDeck to search for things on LinkedIn. So you'll have to do a bit more manually. So make sure you have your social listening down before you do any talking. So even if you have to spend a week or two doing just listening before you start engaging, do that. It's well worth the effort. The next piece would be social engagement. So this is when you get to start talking with people, but in a broader way. So engagement I think of as responding to tweets, commenting on LinkedIn updates, commenting on group discussions. So it's a lot more public. So you're talking with people in public before you take it private. So after you've done a good amount of listening, start engaging and really providing insights. And don't just link to an article. Make sure you are adding value to anything that you are discussing. Take the extra 5 seconds, sometimes 10 or seconds to write a good response, to write a good tweet, to really connect with people so they feel like you are personalizing that interaction, not just blasting to them or using a script. So remember, there's always a real person behind each and every avatar. So don't get lazy. Don't just copy a mass message. If you're going to copy a message, make sure to personalize it and leave a space for that in your template. All right. And then the last part, of social selling, I would say, is when it gets personal. This is what all we have done to this point is leading up to, and that's where we really get one-on-one with people. And by this point, the people you are reaching out to one-on-one should have seen you. They should have come across your personal brand on LinkedIn and/or Twitter. They should have probably seen you engaging on LinkedIn or Twitter and really providing insights, and now they're ready to talk to So this is when you can send a personalized LinkedIn connection invitation. This is when you can tweet at someone and ask a question. This is when you get into that back and forth exchange. And I feel like this is where the magic happens. This is where social selling really works and all of the hard work you put into the process up to this point. This is where you get to see if what you've done is actually succeeding. So this is the best way I feel like to start developing deeper relationships. The goal with this one-on-one messaging is not just to stay in the message feed, stay in LinkedIn, or stay in Twitter. It's to actually probably get to a call, get to a meeting, get to a collaboration, or take it into email. So that's going to be your goal and your calls to action with your messages after you go back and forth a little bit on social media. So I'd like to spend about 5 to 10 minutes on this each weekday. And so That allows me to stay in contact with people, to nurture, to reach out to people to see where they're at, or if I've come across something interesting on social media that, you know, I noticed that they've done. This is a good way to just touch base with everyone that you have been building relationships, relationships with up to this point. All right. So basically, that's it. Social selling is a 2-way conversation. I like to emphasize More social, less selling. And total, if you put everything together after you've done your personal branding section, it should take you between 20 to 30 minutes a day. And that's all you need to do to be successful with social selling. So thanks everyone, I'm excited to answer any questions that you may have.

Thank you, Mindy. And I'm sure our attendees have a much stronger idea of how to build their social selling systems. But as you said, there are questions for you. I've got a few good questions from the audience teed up for you. And I'd like to remind our audience that it's not too late to ask your own question by typing it into the Q&A tab. Before we do that, if your website search can improve your ROI but you don't know where to start, SoloSegment has a special, special offer just for the listeners of this webinar. The first 3 listeners to contact info@solosegment.com will receive 50% off the Site Search Inspector for their website for 6 months. You can immediately start tracking search metrics, plus you can give your team access to a knowledge base that tells them exactly what to do to improve those metrics. Email info@solo-segment.com and tell them you were at the Biznology webinar to get your half-price discount while it lasts. If you're too late to be one of the top 3, you can still get 20% off by measure— by mentioning this webinar. We're about to start firing questions at Mindy, but we need to thank our sponsors once again. Barnraisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. The Conversion Company, predictable, repeatable growth, boost new business by getting in front of the right people. Garrus Corp, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. Mountaintop Data is a B2B marketing intelligence company providing marketing lists as well as data cleaning, data appending, and data maintenance services. GaggleAmp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. Try GaggleAmp for free today. And SoloSegment, your one-stop shop for targeted B2B content marketing techniques, including website search and website personalization. Now on to your questions. So Mindy, first question, I have no sales experience, can I do social selling? It feels more comfortable than cold calling.

Ah, that's a great question. Um, with social selling, yes, the answer is yes, first of all. And it is more comfortable than cold calling. I come from the marketing side of things, and so cold calling and, uh, I guess sales was a little bit foreign to me. And social selling has actually kind of been a great bridge for me to start getting into my prospects' inboxes without having to do the cold call. So I feel like you really nurture these people before you just reach out to them on LinkedIn or on Twitter. And I feel like a lot of mistakes that salespeople do make when they're getting into social selling is treating social selling like a cold call. And just instead of calling them, they will just shoot them a message. And that's not what you should do. You should definitely go the slower route, which is finding your prospects, finding where they're hanging out, joining into those conversations. And then slowly but surely, like, working that relationship with each of your prospects. So yes, you can do social selling, and it is so much better than cold calling.

Terrific, terrific. So next question, how do you advise people when trying to balance their personal objectives versus company objectives? I want to be as attractive as possible as a potential employee, but I also have to use LinkedIn to sell my company's services to other people.

That is an excellent question, and I feel like there's a great balance when you are redoing or revamping your LinkedIn profile. So what you could do is you could either prioritize one or the other. So if you are actively job searching, you may want to tweak your LinkedIn profile to be more attractive to people who are hiring and companies. But I would still not forget the services that I'm selling and still try to appeal to my audience. That's one way you could go about it. The other way. Way is to focus on just going all out with social selling and using your LinkedIn profile to sell your company's services to the other people. And when these job— these people trying to fill these job slots see your profile, they are going to be impressed because you are not the traditional candidate. And when they see that you are actively using your LinkedIn profile and leveraging it to reach out to other people and to prospects, they're going to want you on their team. And I've actually had Dozens of headhunters reach out to me because of my LinkedIn profile, and even though I was not trying or seeking a job, they just saw my profile and thought, "Wow, this is awesome, and this is what we're looking for. This is the type of person that we want on our team." So yes, you can kind of use it for both directions and and kind of gamify it a little bit. And I'm happy to troubleshoot too. Like if you have questions in like a unique situation, you can just shoot me an email and we. Terrific.

We have time for one more quick question. Someone would like more detail about Nimble. They asked, is it similar to Hootsuite?

Nimble is a little bit different than Hootsuite. I would say Hootsuite is more— Hootsuite and TweetDeck are a little more similar. They're used for more monitoring and scheduling and posting updates to different channels on social media. And Nimble I see as more of a CRM. So it's just kind of like a socialized version of a CRM. So there's a little bit of a difference between the two, even though some of the functions and the things that they do are very similar.

Terrific, Mindy. That's all the time we have for today. I really want to thank you for these great ideas, and thanks especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. If any of you had questions we didn't have time to answer, you can email your questions to eileen@mikemoran.com. And she'll be sure to get them to Mindy for the answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link to the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, Auditing Your Digital Marketing: Identifying Ways to Improve Marketing Effectiveness, with Andrew Skolkind, scheduled for 11 AM US Eastern Time on September 19th. We hope to see everybody back there then. Bye everybody.

Thank you.

Bye.