There’s an incredible shift happening in the world. We are now more connected than ever and the landscape of business is transforming every day with the advent of newer and better technological innovations. Given such rapid movements to make the world more connected and interactive, how is social media — our one-stop for all the information — changing our lives?

Social media is no longer just a medium to connect and communicate. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are increasingly investing their financial resources to become a more service-oriented platform for users.

Today, people also use it to shop (93 per cent of shoppers’ buying decisions are influenced by social media), share, recommend and purchase things they need. There's a high chance that you came across this very article because someone recommended it on social media.

But what impact does social media have on businesses? Huge. With the advent of social media, the conversation flow is no longer unidirectional. People aren’t just listening but “interacting” with brands and businesses across various domains of customer service, rewards and services. And this isn’t just true for B2Cs. Even B2Bs aren’t behind — as 54 per cent of B2B marketers said, they have generated leads from social media.

Four ways to do it Social selling is all about finding the prospects, connecting and engaging with them. But the journey is not easy. It requires investment of time and effort but thankfully there are some smart social selling hacks to achieve quick results. Below are some of the ethical hacks to master social selling:

Twitter Stories Hack: You might have tweeted a thousand times about a particular topic but do you really get enough attention? If not, then there’s a solution through a very easy hack.

Decide on your favourite topic. Let’s say a person (in this case Gaurav) wants to highlight his tweets about social selling hacks to a larger audience. Most of the times, to do this, people increase the volume of tweets around the topic or create a new hashtag around social selling hacks.

This is fine but the tweets are often lost in the crowded stream. In order to gain authority, leverage the following steps:

Pick up your existing tweet which covers a particular topic (social selling hacks). Now instead of creating a new tweet next time, reply to the same tweet with the new content.

Follow this for other tweets related to social selling hacks and it will create stories around a particular topic with high dominance.

Tweets Cloud Hack: Before approaching a prospect, it is important to understand the prospect’s area of interest. Use a tool called Tweetails to generate the word cloud of the prospect’s tweets. In a word cloud I would generate, for instance, you would find that I’m passionate about marketing, brands, digital, story-telling and so on.

Automated lead alerts from LinkedIn: Tracking new leadership hiring in a particular company can be great prospecting opportunity. LinkedIn provides automated alerts when an individual joins at a particular designation in the company. Here are the steps: a) Enter the designation in the keyword search and company name

b) Once you get the search results, you may choose to save the results which will act as an alert. To set up an alert, click on save search:

A new window will open which will give you an option to set up the alert. Alerts can be set up daily, weekly or monthly. You will receive an email once someone joins as Vice-President at Oracle. The same way, you can set up alerts based on keywords for prospects from a particular company

Socedo: Socedo helps sales and marketing professionals leverage social media to discover and qualify leads through automated engagement. The system generates a list of prospects based on their Twitter activities. There is an option to select professional under following categories. Once the prospect is identified, it automates the engagement with the prospect. There is an option to follow back and like the tweets at a well-defined frequency. Socedo is considered by some to be 10 times more effective than email.

So what are you waiting for, begin your social selling journey now!

APURVA CHAMARIA VICE-PRESIDENT, HCL TECHNOLOGIES

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