What Is Social Selling?

Get to know the strategy that helps you improve your brand value, your content, and your sales through social media

Online sales are becoming increasingly more important. The digital age has revolutionized practices, ideas, and marketability, offering opportunities to grow and adopt new strategies, while causing old ways to become obsolete. One of the new options is social selling, a new way of making the most of social media–such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram–and connecting with the market, branding, and identifying potential customers among users.

Núria Mañé (@nuriacomunica) is passionate about digital communication, creativity, and technology. She has almost twenty years of experience working closely with companies and entrepreneurs and in this post she shares what she knows about social selling with Domestika:

What is social selling?

With the term “social selling”, we describe the use we make of social media to meet, connect, understand, and investigate sales prospects. It is a digital and very current way to develop meaningful relationships with potential clients. It's a sales strategy that offers us data about potential customers, including their areas of interest.

Where do we find it?

If you have a business page on Facebook or Instagram, a LinkedIn profile, or a professional account on Twitter, you are already involved in basic social selling. You may not have used this term before to describe your online activity, but if you present yourself within a digital environment, you are, in essence, already social selling.

What does social selling consist of?

It consists of using social media platforms to create a brand that transmits trust and reliability to customers, listens actively to the clients' needs, and offers perfect solutions. From a sales point of view, it provides the opportunity to talk about business with a new or existing client through social media.

Why is social selling necessary?

When social selling is done correctly, all the right conversations, relations, and deals create a viable sales strategy for all types of businesses, companies, products, or services.

How do you do social selling?

There are different options for social selling, but there are some essential pointers to follow to do this correctly:

- You need a well-structured plan. You must have a clear idea of what you are doing at the moment and how you want to move forward.

- Your selling style must be one that would attract you also as a buyer. Focus on the instances in which you had a positive experience as a customer.

- Your main aim when posting on your social media is to provide value. Ask yourself: how can I create this trademark for my target market?

- Offer answers and ideas, share information, be sincere, generate content that demonstrates how relevant you are to the audience you wish to attract.

- Do not try to sell too quickly. Build a relationship between your brand and the users first, through trust and influence.

- Put aside corporate formality and find a voice that benefits your rapport with a user, a client, and a potential customer.

- Start conversations and participate in them. Interact intelligently in discussions to build your personal brand and increase your influence within a market.

- Go live. Organize live streams, surveys, Q&A's on Twitter, competitions... This all adds value to your connection with large groups and possible customers.

- Be fun. Use some humor, make yourself and your brand more accessible and relatable.

In her Domestika course, 'LinkedIn: Build Your Personal Brand', Núria Mañé teaches you how to improve your brand and your market visibility, widen your network, get new clients, or even change careers.

You may be interested in:

- Introduction to Social Media for Creative Entrepreneurs, a course by Pamela Barrón.
- Introduction to Digital Marketing on Instagram, a course by Otman Amesnaou.
- Branded Content and Content Curation for Your Personal Brand, a course by Carla González and Eva Morel