What are the best ways to balance relationship building, networking, and prospecting for social selling?

2 Create a content plan

Content is the driving force of social selling, enabling you to attract, educate, and nurture prospects while showcasing your expertise and value proposition. However, you must have a content plan that is tailored to your goals, buyer's journey, and social media platforms in order to get results. This content plan should include a content calendar that details what, when, and where to post content, as well as a content mix that balances different types of content such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, case studies, and testimonials. Additionally, you should have a content distribution strategy that utilizes both your own channels such as your website or email list and third-party platforms like Medium or Quora. Finally, you must have a measurement system in place to track and analyze the performance of your content like impressions, clicks, shares, comments, leads etc.

3 Engage with your prospects

Posting content is essential, but engaging with your prospects on social media is just as important. Liking, commenting, sharing, and messaging them can help build rapport, trust, and credibility, as well as generate interest in your solution. To be successful in social selling engagement, you must be strategic and authentic. Be helpful, relevant, and respectful. Offer value, insights, and feedback. Ask open-ended questions. Listen and empathize. Use humor and personality. On the other hand, avoid being spammy, irrelevant, or disrespectful. Don't pitch your product or service. Don't interrupt or dominate the conversation. Don't make assumptions or judgments. And don't use jargon or slang.

4 Follow up and nurture your leads

The ultimate goal of social selling is to move your prospects from awareness to consideration to decision. But this doesn't happen overnight. You need to follow up and nurture your leads until they are ready to buy from you. This means staying in touch with them, providing them with more value and information, and addressing their objections and concerns. You can use tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Mailchimp to automate and personalize your follow-up and nurturing campaigns. You can also use social media to reinforce your email or phone communication, by sending reminders, invitations, or thank-you notes.

5 Optimize your social selling routine

Social selling is a powerful tool for connecting with potential customers, partners, and influencers, and growing your business. To ensure you make the most of your efforts and avoid wasting time or annoying prospects, it's important to have a clear and consistent routine. Optimizing your social selling activities involves prioritizing the most important tasks, such as creating content and engaging with prospects, scheduling specific times and days for your social selling activities, and automating processes like finding prospects or sending messages. For example, you can use tools like Google Calendar or Trello to plan and organize tasks, Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule and automate content posting, and Zapier or IFTTT to automate processes. By following these tips, you can optimize your social selling strategy and achieve better results.