Is social marketing different than social selling? Yes, indeed. The tools are the same, but the way you use them successfully for marketing versus selling depends on where your perspective customer is in the buyer’s journey.
Social Media Marketing vs Social Media Selling
Are they different? Yes!
Social media marketing is about leveraging social media platforms to listen to prospects, understand their problems and concerns, and develop content that communicates your unique value among your competitors. With the right content and platform, anyone in your organization can be involved in effective social marketing by sharing professional insights and opinions, white papers, e-books, and other types of decision-shaping content.
Social media selling is about leveraging social media to connect with prospects who already have at least a general purchase intent and are ready to engage with you to discuss their unique requirements. These perspective customers are much further along in the buyer’s journey. Given the right content and platform, both field and inside sales reps can be effective with social selling, by sharing timely information and sales-oriented content.
Good social marketers know when to move a prospect into the sales pipeline, and good social sellers know when to refer a prospect back to the marketing pipeline for development so they can focus their energy on sales.
An excellent social media campaign can bridge the gap between social marketing and social selling. It can also incorporate automation tools to simplify the process of listening to prospects, distilling and distributing excellent content for social sharing, and facilitating engagement with targeted prospects to move them through the decision-making process and into a sale.
What Do You Need to Learn?
The number of social media platforms is growing. It used to be just LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Today you also have Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and Google+. But don’t be surprised if a year from now there are even more. Each platform requires you to set up a profile. Each has its own set of rules for posting, including character counts and image specifications. And the rules can change! Each platform can also be seen as addressing different audiences, for example, B2B or B2C. You also need to understand how to use hashtags. And these can change, too! And finally, the lifespan of a post on these different platforms varies.
You need to understand all of that to be successful. Does it sound complicated? Let’s make it easy.
How Can You Easily Learn Everything You Need to Know?
That’s simple. You just need a good teacher! Connect with someone who has been in the game for a long time and can guide you through the INs and OUTs, set you up with automation tools, and keep you posted when the rules of the game change.
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