How can you share relevant content for social selling?

Relevant content for social selling needs to be aimed at different stages of the buyer journey. Please be aware that if a client doesn't know you, they will not give you more than 2 - 3 minutes to spend on your content. An infographic can be a good conversation starter, a white paper is more suitable to follow up. Include these pillars in your content strategy as diversification makes you more attractive for people to follow: 1) Personal Content / Storytelling 2) Thought Leadership Content 3) Industry Related news 4) Client generated content 5) Event content

In social selling, understanding your audience goes beyond knowing their demographics. It's about grasping their needs, challenges, and aspirations to create content that resonates. One effective way to do this is by creating a 'buyer persona' - a detailed profile of your ideal customer, including their industry, job role, pain points, and goals. This persona serves as a blueprint for your content creation, ensuring your message is tailored and relevant.

Content is part of the social selling mix. Knowing not just the pain points but the motivations of your audience become important. Making sure you understand their primary objectives, objections and how they do business. For example, larger businesses have more decision makers, often needing to influence more than just one role or person. Also, there is the mix of the business needs and the buyers personal motivations too Knowing your audiences needs and wants and curating a mix of content around that, some examples are: How to's - practical advice and tips Case Studies - how you've helped others Personality - Sharing the personal side.

This is the most important item you can master. Knowing your client, knowing their ideal customer and WHY? The why is strong enough,the relationship will succeed! It is the what drives passion and purpose.

Be intentional with everything you post. Every piece of content you either create or curate should have a clear purpose for your strategy. Always strive to add value to your audience by providing context. Just sharing an article by saying "Great read" is not good enough. People's time and attention are worth a lot more nowadays. Curate industry insights from all angles. Credibility is built by demonstrating you have a 360-degree view of what's going on in your industry.

Most importantly have a perspective, even if it turns some people off. Trying to please everyone and being afraid of taking a stand is a recipe for the most bland, wallpaper content that will get no engagement. In social engagement people connect with people, be a whole person.

Using content provided by your in-house teams is a good first step to social selling, but if you want to elevate yourself above the rest, write your own message. People can tell when a post is authentically written, so use your personality and let it shine.

One of the most foolish traps you can fall into when social selling is convincing yourself that you know the “best time” to post. It simply does not exist. Instead of obsessing about the perfect time to post, obsess about perfecting what you post. Create content that starts conversations. Give your post the best chance to reach a wide audience. If you prompt a strong conversation in the comments section, your post will continue to thrive a long time after you actually post it. What you post is much more important than when you post.

When posting your own content, always return to the content to see who is engaging with it, and develop the conversation further. If someone has liked the post, asking them what they liked about it. Visit your connection's profiles too, and start engaging with them. LinkedIn has a great feature where you can see all the content they are posting and engaging with. Use it to generate conversations: comment on posts, message them about posts they are engaging with. This kind of tactic separates the social selling novices from the experts, so stand out from the crowd.

I had a mentor, Mr.C, who taught me that a skill such as "Active Listening" with clear intent will help target, engage with audiences that lead to meaningful engagement.

Always look at your content to see how it's performing, and take an OKR (objective & key results) approach to improve. Develop your own metrics based on engagements. If your content isn't performing, ask yourself why. Is it the time of day, the content you've written, or the relevance of it? Use this information to drive your social selling strategy. All social media programs have to be agile due to their fast-paced nature, so use your metrics and tweak them to suit your program.

Is so important to track and measure and have a good starting point and check-ins every 2 weeks and really really focus on the end I work backward and adjust your plan accordingly when the team on individual can Master this is seriously nothing they can do except get ready for success my mentor Mr C's used to save people who work on Sunday they have a problem a tax problem effort between you and you listening is a character choice .

Look at data that's available publicly, but don't use it as the be-all and end-all. This is because every audience is unique. The most commonly asked question I get is "When is the best time to post on LinkedIn?". While there is a lot of data that suggests early afternoon Tues-Thurs, your audience might be different. Testing is the best way of doing things and finding a time that works for your audience will drive results. For example, if you are customers are city-based, they may be looking at LinkedIn on the train to work and on their way home. Every audience is unique. Also, look out for articles like this one and add your contributions. It will grow your authenticity amongst your audience.