5 tips on how salespeople can use social media to grow leads

Any company that has an active sales force on board knows how important it is to use all available opportunities to generate new sales leads and ultimately new revenue.  One of the most popular methods of doing this is by using social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.  Companies are now recognising how important content and customer participation is for sales.

Social media is now growing at such a rapid rate it has become a vital part of any companies marketing strategy. What is now happening is more and more customers are looking at social media to find out information about brands, products and companies. They are turning to social media to see what others are saying. Potential customers are using platforms like Twitter and Facebook to talk about your business. Whether you as a company like this or not, you don’t really have much say in the matter. Using platforms like Twitter enable you to engage with your audience. If someone is complaining about your product or service in a tweet, then tweet them back and talk to them and help them with the issue they are having. Using this method shows your customer you actually care about what they say.

Any company who has a sales force who are savvy in subject matter have a great asset in the fact these people know their stuff and know exactly how to communicate with customers. Companies need to stop being stuffy about the use of Facebook in a corporate environment and start to realise the potential the sales team can reach through the use of social media platforms.

After all the sales force team are communicating with prospective customers and clients through mobile communication, email and newsletters, it only makes sense that they continue communicating through social media channels.

Here are 5 top tips on effective tactics for sales force professionals:

#Tip 1: Create a relevant social participation destination
Whatever you choose to set up – blog, Tumblr, Twitter timeline, Facebook fan page, YouTube channel or Linked In, having a central hub is most relevant for any active sales person. This hub will act as the central channel for all participation with customers. This hub will publish relevant content for customers to socially participate in. Calls to action will be made as well as the opportunity to send out invitations for participation on a business level. Not only that this hub you create will open up the arena for other bloggers and content publishers to link to – resulting in good search engine position.

#Tip 2: Regularly monitor for leads and engagement
All businesses are looking for ways to increase their revenue. Right now potential customers are waiting for you to find them to sell them your new product. On a daily basis people are tweeting that they are looking for something - a new phone, graphic design or web hosting. Twitter can be used to search for these types of relevant tweets through the use of trending topics and it enables you to connect with new sales leads.

There are many free search tools that can open doors to discussions for you including search.twitter.com, Facebook search engines and socialmention.com. In an ideal world a company would use a strong social media monitoring tool that includes filtering options so you can extract the data you want.

#Tip 3: Create, Curate and Repurpose
Any sales professional will always tell you they are busy. For this reason alone, it is essential for these professionals to keep their head in the game with social media. Efficiency on all social media platforms that are applicable is essential. Keeping up to date with what is happening on relevant topics around their product enables sales force teams to create content plans.  Creating content can be time consuming and challenging. Therefore, it is important to think about how content can be repurposed to keep your audience engaged.

A good way of doing this is to keep a blog for each sales person.  Using these blogs you can compile short eBooks and useful articles to publish elsewhere on the web as well as in marketing material.

#Tip 4: Participate, participate, participate
Participation cannot be stressed enough when it comes to turning potential sales into sales. Effective sales force teams will hunt out relevant forums and blogs where they can add comment, comments that add value to the post. Social media sites including Linked In, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter enables these professionals to share useful information as well as ask their followers questions – sniff out the most relevant groups and individuals. Klout is the new kid on the block and is fast becoming popular as the influencer tool that everyone should use. This enables users to engage and compare their influence against others.

Although this may seem time consuming, participating regularly on social media platforms will reap rewards for sales people. Spending 15 minutes each day to engage on social media shows that you are actively participating with your audience. Use tools such as Hootsuite where you are able to schedule your tweets at specified times in the day.

#Tip 5: Collaborate
The power of social media means corporate marketers are able to monitor social media and deduce which are the most effective platforms for their business. By doing this you are able to create a set of guidelines and best practices beneficial to everyone.

The continued use of social media tools and platforms increases your presence as well as enables you to engage prospects easily. These best practices can be shared with sales force teams through templates, networking events and classroom training.

As with everything social media efforts will vary according to your target audience.  A social media marketing strategy on its own will not guarantee social media success.