A layman’s guide to being successful on social media.

If I was going to simplify success on social media…if I was to boil it down to the most basic, fundamental straightforward four questions to drive success it would be these.

• How do I look?
• Are the people I want to talk to likely to see me?
• Are those people actually seeing me?
• Do those people like what they see?

If you can answer all of these things positively you are a winner. Simple as that. But very few people can. Let’s look at each of these in turn and see what we mean.

This is the most basic one. This is absolutely a measure of how attractive you are to the people who look at you. An impressive resume and a good profile are not the same thing at all. You can have the most incredible track record of success but i) who ever tells the truth on their CV, and ii) are people actually reading it? Your profile needs to address a number of points for the reader such as do I like/trust this person, are they interesting/boring, do they look like they have the skills I need, do I think they understand me.

I have got a pretty good profile (as has everyone in the DLA Ignite network) because it is different to most profiles. It is based on telling a story, it has some funny/recognisable hooks, it encourages you to read more to get to know me. I know my profile is doing a good job because it starts conversations. I am not deluded enough to imagine that everyone likes it or that anyone reads all of it but there is something in there for everyone I am proud of my family, my love of music, the work I have done, what I have achieved, what people say about me…and I know this works because people often reach out to me and reference something they have read in my profile whether that’s playing the guitar, traveling in the Middle East or some of my thinking.

We all have a story to tell and telling yours is the best way to create the opportunity for people to empathise with you and to want to chat.

Are the people I want to talk to likely to see me?

This is all about network and is it in the right place. Most people I know have been on LinkedIn for over a decade. Some since it first launched (over 21 years ago). It is ridiculous for most of us to imagine that we need to know the same type of person today that we did a decade or more ago. For this reason we need to be mindful of i) where our network is, and ii) where we need our network to be.

A good starting point is to reference your existing network against your target accounts. For example, if I am trying to sell to IBM I probably will have a tough job because I have 13 connections and IBM has 294,000 employees.

With people constantly moving role/company/country, people being laid-off or retiring etc not having adequate coverage in a business is very risky indeed. And, if you are going to share insightful, clever, entertaining content you want to make sure that the people you are trying to influence are going to see it, in my case a 0.0045% coverage means I am all but invisible in IBM so I am unlikely to be known and I will have to work very hard to build consensus and sell.

Are those people actually seeing me?

It’s all well and good being well connected in places (unlike me in IBM) but are those people seeing you? For most of us the answer is a resounding “no” and we know this because if we look at the stats on a post (assuming you have a premium version of LinkedIn) we can see the companies, the job titles and the location of the most popular viewers of our posts. Whilst this information is utterly useless in terms of actionable insights it is quite handy to be able to see whether the people we want to see our content “might” actually be seeing it.

If we post something and it’s “seen” by 1000 people and investigation shows that most of those people are in our target accounts and at the right level of seniority and in the right region we know that our connecting strategy is starting to work. This is a very important first step to creating value.

Something to remember though is that “views” mean nothing. A view means that the content has shown up on someone’s timeline NOT that they have noticed or dwelled on it, let alone actually read it. To underline this point an ex-client of ours posted an image and a story which went viral and received 6,500,000 views but nobody messaged saying ”great post…can I buy your products please.”

Yes, he might have generated some inbound with this post...but he didn't. The point is that these days you cannot rely on the reader to take the next step.

Do those people like what they see?

Whilst “views” are very much a vanity metric and prove very little, what is good is when someone engages with our content because then we can reach out to them and say hello because we know exactly who they are. It also means that these people have (we hope) consumed our content and think it worthy of comment or interaction.

We also need to remember that my newsfeed is like yours – it is composed of just three types of content. 1. Content from people we are connected to (or follow), 2. Promoted content (from advertisers or people that want to place their offer before us), and 3. Content from people not in our network that we see because people we are connected to are liking/commenting on it. So, every person that “likes” a piece of your content is pushing this out in to their network.

And finally...

If our content doesn’t get “likes” we must face the fact that it is because people don’t actually like it. We do need to be pragmatic with everything we do in this space because there’s a difference between what we hope happens and what actually happens. In some cases a VERY big difference.

For everyone in the B2B space we can only sell our products/services from having a conversation with someone and how you behave on social media (following-up with new connections, likes/comments and interactions) is simply an opportunity to engage someone in a conversation and see where it goes.

Of course, there is a little more to it than this. You need to have some sort of plan, you need to trial things, you need to have calls and qualify those, you need to have a content strategy, you need to test test test and you need to persevere as somethings take longer than others. Things will happen quickly (because they invariably do) but you need to make this a lifestyle change to ensure that you can create a constant and ongoing stream of conversations/leads/pipeline/revenue in to the future.

To find out more...drop me a line.

#socialselling #pipeline #digitalselling #salestransformation #sales?