Can professionals use strategic social selling to build trust? - Part II
Lenwood M. Ross
Monopoly, Charades, and Rummikub -- dominating family game nights for 30 years and counting
The traditional way to get recommendations and referrals is networking. Whether we attend a networking event or regular BNI meetings, we know from experience that getting a recommendation from someone who knows, likes, and trusts us is pure gold.
Part I of this article explained that strategic social selling is the modern way to network and build relationships for commercial success. It’s much more effective than the traditional analog approach.
In Part II, I’ll explain how we can use strategic social selling to build trust.?
There are three critical aspects of strategic social selling that help us move quickly from new contact to a relationship.?Each aspect is important to our goal.?
Social Presence?
Your social presence is both passive and active. It is your social media profiles and your social behaviors. Social media profiles are self-explanatory. Social behaviors are how you engage with people on social media.?
Which of the people in the picture above has a better social presence. Your social presence should be written by you and be authentic to you.?
Many people argue that they don’t have time to craft their LinkedIn profile. That position is a terrible mistake and is akin to saying, “I don’t have time to bathe.”?It sounds ludicrous. But, it’s true.?
Our social presence is how we lay the foundation for trust.
Developing our Network.?
We must develop our network to build our community. This is an important concept that many, including myself, fail to appreciate at first.?
When we invite a connection into our network, we’re adding one more log to our community fire.?
We don’t want random connections. We want people in our community that will engage. We want people in our community who will find value in the content we plan to create and curate. So, we want people in our target market; but we also want advocates and champions. These are people who know, like and trust us. They help to amplify our message.?Without them, it isn’t easy to build a community.?
Content
Content is key. We use content to demonstrate our expertise, create conversations and humanize ourselves. These are the most valuable things that we can do on social media. So, content is king.?
Content is also fertile ground for professionals. Professionals make their living on knowledge. Demonstrating our expertise while sharing content that humanizes us is the best way to foster connection and empathy.???
We can use these three elements together to create an authentic picture of who we are or create an online persona that is not authentic.?
What do you think is the best approach?
Authenticity and Integrity
Inauthentic profiles create a trust problem.?
People don’t do business with people they don’t trust if they can help it.
To determine whether our social presence will help us create trust, we must ask two questions.??
Trust is complex. It is built up over time based on our behaviors. Whether we can create trust using social media depends on how our behaviors conform to our corporate core values.
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Our social presence should align with our core values. When we practice our core values rather than simply professing them and reflect them in our social presence, we're demonstrating integrity even when it’s not fun, fast, or easy.?
Integrity is a key element of building trust.
By the same token, when our social presence directly contradicts our behaviors, we lack integrity, destroying trust.??Therefore, being authentic on social media is at the heart of building trust.?
On social media, the one thing we can do that will destroy trust is selling. Don’t pitch your services 1 to 1 on social media.?
Trust can not be manufactured. It can, however, be transferred. What does that mean??
When people recommend us, generally, some of their relationship goodwill is transferred to our account. Because of this transfer of goodwill, people will often be slow to recommend until they have vetted you. This is very common.?
It is also part of the friction that slows recommendations. Other types of friction can slow recommendations and referrals to a drip, even when our contacts are intentional about helping us.
On social media, that friction is eliminated because of the platform. Like, comments and shares spread our message through our network’s network into our 2nd and 3rd connections.?
As we build a community, our message is amplified. When people in our community consistently engage with our content, we accrue goodwill to our account, which helps us build trust.?
This brings me back to integrity. Your social presence can destroy goodwill when it doesn’t align with your core values.?
Practicing your core values offline and on social media is the best way to create and sustain integrity. Without integrity, we can not build trust.?
Focus on integrity to help you build trust in your relationships offline and on social media.
If you found this article helpful, please share it. Tag people in the comments that might find it interesting.
You can contact me directly via direct messaging about our services.
We can create a customized social selling strategy for your organization and a virtual strategic social selling transformation program using?our collaborative learning platform.
Collaborative learning yields the highest engagement and retention of any learning method available today, accelerating behavior change across organizations of all sizes.
?? Sustainability Coach |?? Burnout Prevention Architect| Helping leaders & teams say yes to focus, productivity, and action | International Best Selling Author |?? Podcaster
3 年Great read!
Husband, father, SEO getting you consistent, unlimited traffic without ads ???? FreeSEObook.com, written from 17 years as SEO agency owner
3 年Such a helpful article, Lenwood. Great read. Thanks for sharing! ??
40 Under 40 CPA Practice Advisor | Top 50 Women in Accounting | Helping B2A (Business to Accountant) companies and accounting firms increase their impact, influence, and income through leadership marketing. ??
3 年Awesome read, Lenwood. Thank you for sharing!
?? Recovering Engineer ? Building Automatic Sales Funnels for Small Business Owners ?? Featured ????
3 年Thank you for sharing this article with great content, Lenwood M. Ross
Helped 300+ professionals and entrepreneurs overcome stagnation and indecision, achieving clarity, personal, financial growth, and up to 50% productivity improvement in just 8 weeks.
3 年Nice one