The Secrets of Social Selling Week 16 - starting to engage

Often we forget that social networks are about people. Yes, they give us a platform to present who we are. They provide an incredible opportunity for us to publish our content our thinking our ideas. And of course they give us an opportunity to build an audience. By connecting to the people that we would like to have conversations with we are able to build and curate a network full of our ideal customers our champions, our friends and our supporters.

However, connecting to people is not enough. If your network is anything like mine, it's large and diverse and despite the fact it has countless people in it many of them I don't really know who they are. We've connected we've exchanged a message but that interaction has gradually faded over time. So when you connect to people, you need to try to pull them into the inner circle of people that you know and more importantly that know you. The way we achieve this is through engaging with them.

We need to remember this is not about getting into somebody's face. This is about demonstrating that we are listening and paying attention to what they're talking about. Liking and commenting on their posts engaging with their comments on other peoples posts perhaps tagging them in some of your posts. All of this helps remind them who you are and how relevant you are to them.

If every single time that you like, comment, or share on a piece of my content you will show up in my notifications...

... that's the little bell icon in the top bar on your LinkedIn profile.

So here you can see that my colleague Timothy "Tim" Hughes 提姆·休斯 L.ISP has liked a comment that I left on one of his posts and has also replied to my comment. The same thing will happen if you engage with my content I will see a thumbnail of your face and your name showing up in my notifications in exactly the same way I have with Tim.

Obviously, the more that Timothy engages with my content the more I become familiar with him and the idea of engaging with his content or accepting a call with him seems like a perfectly normal thing for me to do.

The great thing is that you can engage with many people's content and then with yours and that notifications tab runs back over all of the engagements that you've had since you first started on LinkedIn.

Remember there are more than 1 billion people on LinkedIn and your targets or territory may be a number of very large organisations so there are many many people that you may need to do this to. We normally recommend that you start doing this with just a few of the key people that you would like to have conversations with. As they say, you can't boil the ocean there's no point in dropping just one like on a post from a person because they may not notice you, instead you need to think about this as a campaign you need to select perhaps 10 people and then over the next few weeks regularly like and comment on their activities then you have a great reason to reach out to them and ask them for a chat. Remember there will be lots of people trying to sell them things so you need to not be aiming to pitch at this stage. You literally need to be engaging these people in a friendly conversation to get to know them and nothing else.

So, your task for the week s to make a short list of people you would like to get to know, say 10 or so, and start to engage with their content.

Well done. You've managed the task for the week

(or if you haven't...drop me a line)

If you would like to find out more about our team or individual training programmes please drop me a message or an email to [email protected] for a no obligation chat.

Typically Social Sellers have a much greater ability to start conversations with their ideal customers and as a result have a more robust and dependable pipeline and typically close more business than their noon-social counterparts.

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