hootsuite

Tech Talk: What I Like This Week

Hootsuite

Successful social sellers know that sharing and creating consumable, informative and engaging content is a core element of your social selling strategy. I know peeps who will argue that salespeople shouldn’t be creating content, and I’ll save that topic for another blog post. The challenge for many salespeople is how to keep up with the overwhelming amount of content available to follow much less share it. But sharing content is only one part of your social selling equation. How do you keep up with the people and the companies you want to do business with?

To manage your social media communications on multiple channels, if you aren’t an enterprise company with a big budget, or you are an individual seller trying to work social into your daily sales practice, it is hard to find tools that are powerful and affordable. For less than $10 per month, Hootsuite lets you curate unlimited numbers of RSS feeds, follow and post content to multiple networks like Twitter, LinkedIn or your Facebook fan page and segment information into easily digestible streams of information. For example, I have streams for prospects, companies, influencers, tech companies I follow, etc. Get yourself signed up for HootSuite Pro Totally worth the investment.

Note: that’s Owly giving me a hand monitoring my multiple streams of information. And full disclosure, I have been using Hootsuite for years, but am also an affiliate for the product.

Slack

One of the best platforms I’ve seen for team communication, Slack helps you keep your shared information, files and chatter all in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go. They say that their mission is to make our working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive. Well, I believe them. The free version of Slack provides you with the following: 10,000 message searchable archive, 5 integrations, free native apps for iOS, Android & Mac Desktop and multi-team support. The list of products that Slack integrates with is impressive. You can see the list here. Just a few of them are Asana, Dropbox, Google Hangouts, Mailchimp Trello, Twitter, Visual Studio Online and Zendesk.

One year in, Slack has more than 500,000 daily users in more than 60,000 teams. Every month, Slack users collectively spend over 100 million hours connected to Slack, sending 300 million messages. Pretty darn impressive. What blew me away is many of the stories of how their customers are using Slack. Read their birthday stories here and be inspired. Read to get started? Click here.

Faab Social

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk to Akhtar Kasia who had pinged me on Twitter. Multiple times companies with new technologies they want people to know about have engaged me that way. I love it!

Faab Social is a multi-channel selling platform that integrates the ability to use social media for selling. Essentially, the platform is what Akhtar calls a social commerce solution. If you are a retailer or you have products to sell through the web, this is a must have platform for your business.

FaabSocial is packed with some pretty cool features for anyone with physical products to sell. The ability to sell digital products via the platform is coming soon.

Sell your Products and Services directly from your Social media status.
Show products as “Product Ads” within your status for FREE.
Product management across all social media platforms.
Schedule multiple Product Feed and Inventory Feeds.
Inventory management across all social media platforms.
Full Price Management across all social media platforms.
Shipping Charge Management across all social media platforms.
Geo Target your Status to an audience for Facebook only.Automate full post-sale activities.
Full Facebook Integration for your Social Media Marketing.
Create Facebook Shop.
Create and Manage Facebook Deals.
Mass schedule your status including RSS Feed.
Use product feed data to create Status on the fly and publish it on schedule.
Use our System Anywhere, Anytime, Anyhow.
Secured, Reliability and full Scalability.
Google+, Pinterest, Instagram coming soon.

Dashboard, Analytics and Live Streams these are just a few features that are unique to FaabSocial. Get yourself on over to the site to get signed up!

SocialTech Tuesday: Sharing the Content Love

By Barbara Giamanco 1 Comment

Last week, I shared 15 ideas for creating content that captures interest. It would be lovely if everyone we talked to or had on our target list was ready to buy now, but let’s face it, that’s just not realistic.

Things have changed pretty dramatically since back in the day when I first started selling. Frankly, I think selling is much tougher these days. I say that because…

Decision making seems to take longer than ever with multiple stakeholders involved. Some of these stakeholders don’t even hold real influence, but you have to talk to them anyway (or you think you do).
Buyers have unprecedented access to information. Your feature/benefit dump is wasted effort.
The market is crowded. In pretty much every industry that I can think there is a ton of competition. The trick is to rise above the noise and stand out.
Buyers block calls and delete emails.
Your prospects don’t care about what you want (they never did actually), they care about what they want and what you, your product or your service can do for them. Hint: features aren’t it!

Your ultimate goal with selling is to get IN FRONT of sales opportunities. My goal is to help you become a Content Concierge, because you want to be seen as someone who stays ahead of the curve bringing fresh insights forward and gets prospects thinking about business problems they probably don’t realize they have yet.

That’s where content comes in. Visibility is key and your ability to create, curate and share great content needs to be an integral part of your Strategic Social Selling Plan.

But from talking to and training thousands of people who sell, the idea of becoming a content concierge is a little daunting for these reasons:

Who will create the content?
How will I manage and share the content?
How will I benefit if I do all of this work?

My last post covered creation, so now, let’s talk about the management and sharing of content.

Hootsuite is my content management platform, and I want you to check it out. HootSuite is a social media management system for individuals, businesses and organizations that lets you share content across multiple social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook from one secure, web or mobile-based dashboard. Want to get a bit more sophisticated? You can also leverage a suite of social content apps for Instagram, SlideShare, YouTube, Tumblr and more.

Here is a picture of my Hootsuite Dashboard.

Here are some of the super cool things that you can do:

Schedule content in advance. This is the secret sauce, which allows you to schedule messages to post through the day, week or month while you are off doing your job…selling.

Even with the FREE version, they have this nifty feature called “autoschedule”. You create your message and then let Hootsuite determine the best time to send it to your networks.
You can also click on the “calendar” icon and pick a specific date and time to send your message. The free version allows you to do this for individual emails only.
Buy the premium version and schedule up to 350 messages across your social networks. Talk about making life more efficient. Plan your calendar and cue up relevant content to share at on specific days and times. CAREFUL though… you don’t want to be perceived as a bot, so remember to go back in and engage in conversation with people.

Use RSS to set up your blog/company feed so that messages post automatically when a new post is published. The FREE version lets you establish 5 social sites and/or 3 sites and 2 RSS feeds. The premium gives you an unlimited ability add a mashup of social networks and RSS feeds of the Influencer blogs your follow and whose content you trust.

Use streams to track what your competitors, prospects, customers or influencers are posting about. I mean really, did you actually think you could follow over 250 million tweets daily without the ability to do something like this?

Monitor conversations – cue up messages to social sites like LinkedIn and monitor conversations from within the dashboard.

Share images/files easily with your posts.

Bottom line – to share content consistently, you need the tools and an organized approach to get you there.

If you’d like to learn HOW to put Hootsuite to work you in your social selling activities, you should REGISTER for my session next Tuesday, June 25. I’m going to show you exactly what and how to use Hootsuite to your advantage!

BTW – I a very SPECIAL webinar coming up on June 27. My guest is Jason Wesbescher of Handshakez. Sales people can have their own “room” for sharing visually compelling content and information with their prospects. I promise you – you won’t go back to wasting time with email ever again!

Content Captures Interest

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

Unless this is the first post you’ve ever read of mine, you already know that I believe social selling success breaks down into 3 buckets:

Strategy
Skills
Execution

Basically, you need a plan, sales and technology skills, the right technology to support your goals, consistent execution and a commitment to measure and track your results.

With buyers starting the journey without sales people initially, you need a way to create a sense of authority and influence, and anyone who sells anything certainly needs to be visible and easily found.

A cornerstone of your social selling strategy is having great content to share. And your first tip today, is that the content should not always be yours and it most definitely cannot be a sales pitch!

If you work for a company that is sizable enough to have marketers creating content for you to share…awesome. A word of caution though…the content being served up cannot be perceived by your prospects as your own personal love fest. In other words, provide value in the case studies, white papers, video’s, blog posts or recorded webinars. If all you do is talk about what you sell and how great you are, you just missed the entire point of what social selling is all about.

If you have no content to work with here are 15 ways to serve some up:

Write a blog and/or comment on other top blogs in your industry.
Conduct podcast interviews with industry leaders.
Curate the content from key influencers (not competitors) or websites you like – Forbes, Mashable, TechCrunch, Top Sales World…whoever is important to you in your field… via RSS feeds and using a dashboard tool like Hootsuite.
Follow influencers in your field on Twitter and on LinkedIn. Share their posts.
Reach out to other influencers and ask about guest blogging on their site. If they do podcast or video interviews, ask to be considered for an interview.
Share content from the people you respect and follow on LinkedIn. Use the new mention feature to give them a shout-out.
Conduct a webinar. Deliver your own content or set it up panel style and moderate. Record the session for post follow up and use in sharing content later.
Create a kick-butt presentation and post via Slideshare and then share it with your minions and encourage them to share with theirs.
Curate a newspaper using Paper.li. Add 25 of the top people you like and include their blog posts, tweets, etc. It will post automatically through your Twitter account, and you can also share it with others via email or LinkedIn.
Speak at an event – could be as a featured speaker or a panelist and have it videotaped. Share the video on your LinkedIn profile.
Create a video of your tip of the week. Get really good at it and do it daily.
Host a live tweet chat, capture key points from the discussion and turn that into blog posts, interviews or presentations.
Get to know editors at various online sites who publish blog posts or magazines. Offer to guest write an article.
Host and record a Google hangout session focused on an educational topic that your prospects would be interested in.
Conduct a survey and share the results with prospects and others in your network. For example, I co-authored our Social Media and Sales Quota report, which you can download from our website.

Don’t become overwhelmed with these suggestions, you only need to choose a few of them to get you started!

If you have content to work with that’s cool. Mix in any corporate content that has been created for you and also integrate a few of the suggestions that I’ve shared with you.

Don’t forget that sharing only your content is boring and will appear self-serving. Make the content you share a nice mix of yours and that of others who offer fresh insights and perspectives.

Once you create content, you have to get really good at sharing it. That takes an organized approach and scheduling, which I will talk about next week. Until then, happy selling!

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