How To Create Content Built For Social Selling

The explosive growth and acceptance of social media has entrepreneurs working hard to get their message into news feeds everywhere. We all want you to “Like us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter,” but it’s what happens after we receive this marketing permission that determines our social selling success.

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are popular places for small business marketers to acquire new customers and keep current customers informed, but these platforms should not be used for pushing your offerings repeatedly onto your audience. You didn’t wake up this morning and say, “I can’t wait to log into Facebook and check out all the new advertisements!” Guess what? Your audience didn’t either.

Social selling isn’t about pumping out tweet after tweet promoting your wares, or flooding your G+ stream with product plugging posts. In my opinion, social selling isn’t really about selling at all. It’s about helping your audience discover the right reasons to buy. Effective social selling begins with identifying your customer’s problem, and using your content to help them understand how your company can help them solve that problem. If you would like to see an actionable example, click the image below to check out the article Jenn Herman shared with her Google+ audience. That’s social selling done right!

Know Who You Are Creating Content For

Before you can begin creating compelling social content, you need to have a solid understanding of what your audience wants. You won’t be able to deliver relevant information if you don’t have a clue what topics get your audience passionate!

Knowing your audience goes beyond basic demographic information like age, gender, and income. To really know your customers, you must know what drives them:

• What are their goals?
• What challenges do they face?
• What excites them?
• What do they worry about?
• What do they want?
• What are their needs?

Executing a content strategy with these things in mind will allow you to focus your message on subjects that potential customers can relate to.

Creating Content That Gets Results

Now that you have a better idea of what inspires your audience, you can begin to create content that truly resonates with them. Instead of trying to force upon your readers what you want them to hear, concentrate on their challenges, fears, or desires and present your message that way. Let’s take a closer look at a Facebook post from B Squared Media to illustrate this technique.

The post image speaks directly to concerns that many entrepreneurs have when considering outsourcing their social media. Should they pony up the dough for a pro? What could happen if they cheap out on their social media marketing? Naturally, you want to create content that addresses these fears.

Once you click through to the article, Ballard paints a vivid picture of the various obstacles entrepreneurs face when managing their own social media. Presenting a daunting list of challenges to your audience’s goals will get them interested in finding a better way.

She then presents a comprehensive list of benefits and advantages in favor of outsourcing your social media marketing. The end goal of your social selling content should be introducing your solution as the happy ending your customer was looking for.

The article concludes with a non-intrusive call-to-action prompting the reader to take the next step in the sales process. The reader’s buying motivation is at the peak, so this is the ideal time to convince them to take action!

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a better social selling blueprint than this.

The Takeaway

The key to great social selling is producing content that attracts customers to your products and services without sounding overly promotional. You don’t want your content to read like a sales page. Today’s customers are overloaded with marketing messages. They are tired of being “sold.” Social media marketers who are savvy enough to recognize this and adapt their message will have a huge advantage over those who continue to peddle their products traditionally.

How I Increased My Twitter Followers By 30% in 6 Months

6 months ago I had 1,238 followers less than I have now. That's a 30% increase!

I'm not telling you this to brag, but rather to help you do the same. In this post, I'm going to share with you exactly what I've done differently and how you can use my same strategy to increase your Twitter followers.

A few things you should know first:

1. I did not buy any followers. 
I am very against the practice of paying for fans. If you want real followers who actually care about you, your message, and your business, then you should earn them -- not buy them.

2. I didn't pay for any advertising to my Twitter handle. 
I did pay $20 for a promoted tweet which was spent in about 5 minutes and brought me a few retweets but no new followers.

3. I didn't follow-unfollow. 
In other words, I didn't follow a bunch of people and unfollow those who didn't follow me back. This is another practice I think is ridiculous and quite selfish.

Yes, folks my strategy is 100% all-natural. It takes time, but once it takes hold you'll be happy that you actually worked for it rather than cutting corners.

Here are the 6 things I did to grow my Twitter following by 30% in 6 months:

How To Increase Your Twitter Followers Naturally & Organically

1. Blog On A Regular Basis 
This by far is the most important thing you can do to increase your Twitter followers. By now, you should know that when it comes to blogging, I mean business. And rightfully so, because it is my business. At Convert With Content, we manage social media & blogging for our clients. It is also my business as a marketer to educate clients and potential clients on why blogging for your business is a practice that can increase your social media presence, your authority, your traffic and your leads.

I'm living proof that blogging on a regular basis helps increase your Twitter followers. The reason is simple. When you blog, you have something to share on social networks and you have something for others to share on social networks. If that person has good Twitter etiquette, he or she will attach your name to it. Boom, your Twitter name just got pushed out to a new audience.

2. Tweet On A Regular Schedule 
This is the second most important thing you can do to increase your Twitter followers. Like blogging consistently, Tweeting consistently will keep your name out there, increase the likeliness of getting replied to and retweeted and increase your reach.

Social Media doesn't sleep and neither should your online presence. I automate many of my tweets to keep my profile updated. If you automate right and follow my rules (insert link to automation article) you will see the benefits of your actions. Now don't get me wrong, you can't rely on automation alone. In fact, that's poor practice. But as long as you're sharing valuable content and relevant content this strategy will work.

Because Twitter is a massive search engine, when you tweet about relevant topics to your industry, you will be found by others interested in those topics. People follow keywords and lists on Twitter. Make use of that wisely.

3. Guest Blog 
By creating a presence beyond your own website, you will be introduced to a new network and with that comes new followers. I am a regular contributor to Social Media Today, Business.com,StateOfDigital.com and other online publications. Anytime I blog for them, they share my content with my Twitter handle attached to their audience. It works.

If you're looking for opportunities to guest blog, you can find many by typing in "Guest Blog Submissions" or something similar in Google. Another way to approach the subject is to ask blogs that you follow and pitch them on a topic that suits their audience. Like all things in social media, it's about building relationships.  If you are an Entrepreneur, you should check out EFactor, it's a great network to blog on.

One thing I know for sure is if you blog regularly on your own site and you create great content other people will come knocking at your door to have you guest blog for them.

4. Include Your Twitter Handle In Your Email Signature (& Everywhere)
If you email a lot, include your Twitter handle in your email signature, on your website, within your blog, inside your Pinterest account, in your LinkedIn headline and anywhere else that's public. The easier you make it for someone to find your profile, the more followers you'll get.

5. Live Tweet & Participate In Twitter Chats 
If you attend conferences live tweet them. It's a great way to grow your following with a targeted audience and network. Participating in Twitter chats has the same effect. I participate in them at least once a month and each time I gain new connections and start to build new relationships.

Pretty simple right? You can do it! I'd love to hear what you do to grow your following.

Hiding your Google+ circles from others

An easy guide to hide your circles on Google+ and improve your privacy – restrict others from looking into your Google+ circles with this small tweak.

Hiding your lists on social networks is one of the basic things you should do for privacy concerns. Google+ doesn’t provide you with lists – unlike Facebook’s friend list, you have circles there, but those can also be set to hidden to improve your Google+ profile privacy.

How can others see my Google+ circles?

Google+, by default, sets your circles visibility to public on your profile page, and therefore, everyone who visits your profile may see the people added you and added by you. If you’re not wanting others to look at your circles, this short guide will show you how to tweak your Google+ circles visibility and make them private.

Starting off, navigate to the about section in your Google+ profile and look for the People box. Just click the Edit link at the bottom of this box.

It will bring up an settings dialog where you can set the visibility of your circles. Uncheck the checkbox options below In your circles and Have you in circles respectively, if you want nobody to see your circles. Or you may show your all or specific circles to the only people who are in your circles by using the Who can see this? option.

Save the changes by clicking the Save button and that’s it! You’ve successfully hid your circles from others. Hope you enjoyed this tut, you may join us at Google+.

Surfing the waves of Google Plus

Whether you are an ocean lover, a surfer or even just enjoy splashing about on Google+ then this is a post for you.

Introduction

We’ve all seen picture and videos of surfers, getting ‘curled’ by a wave and many of us have thought ‘wow’ that looks cool!

When you learn to surf, however, you begin on the shore, with the board on the sand. You learn, well pretend really, how to paddle and you learn to ‘pop’ up onto your feet and surf your first imaginary wave.

And guess what? You are AWESOME, you are a natural. Then you go into the water. And you realise that the paddling on the shore was a lot easier, with much less friction; there were no other people getting in your way, and those darn waves didn’t push you back to the shore when you were attempting to move forward. If you are lucky and conditions are ‘right’ you may catch a wave on your belly, and even stand up for a few seconds as the white water pushes you back towards land. Very often though, it is a real battle for many people. Whichever way, this is your first day of surfing.

Then there is a choice:

The question then is “do you give up?” or go and get your feet wet again. Many will stay land lovers, but for a few they intuit ‘there is something in it’ for them. This where the hard work starts; this is when you begin to push yourself, taking tumbles, stumbling when stand up, paddling harder, getting ‘mashed’. This is pre-surfing. After a while though, something changes – no longer do you simply take the waves already broken, but instead you learn to ‘drop in’ to the wave and surf the glassy surface of the wave’s face. And at that moment, but not before, you are a surfer. And you get it for the first time – this is surfing. Not at all like the splashing about you used to do, not catching a wave on your belly, but the feeling that the wave’s face and your board are inexplicably one experience in that moment. It is inevitably impermanent, and you feel alive and present.

Getting used to the experience

After a while, you get better at ducking under the waves and padding ‘out the back’.

When you are preparing to catch a wave you are looking along the line, trying to spot where the wave is forming, and paddling just a little left and a little right to get yourself best positioned. You could paddle to the other end of the beach, but you usually spot the section of the break earlier and only move if your judgement was off or the peak simply is no longer forming there. To an outsider, they may look at a surfer and think it is all about ‘balance’ but it is not just about balance as surfing requires considerable engagement with the waves, not just countering movement with a counter movement. Instead of meeting the force of the wave, one feels the wave as a force integral to the experience not as something one has to ‘oppose’ or ‘beat’. And over time, as you can see, a surfer will learn about the waves as much as they will about their body and the way their influence the board through their weighting and positioning.

Understanding the environment

Surfing is not just about you though. A large part of surfing is looking from the shoreline and making your best guess where the waves will form.

As you see the existing sets of waves come through – they tend to forming in patterns of 5 or 6 at a time (I looked into it and no on really knows why this happens, but just as the ocean breathes in and out on 6 hour cycles called the tides, it is as if the patterns of sets are some other rhythm to which the sea abides (did you just hear a pirate? I was thinking that kind of a voice). These ‘sets’ of waves inform you of the ocean’s patterns, and in turn once you’ve learned a little more you kind of know what to expect and where to expect it. Sometimes the waves will form in the central part of a beach, and sometimes the break will emerge left or hand. And once in a while, you get lucky; you are in the right place at the right time to have wave’s lip curl above you and with the wall of water to your side, you get ‘tubed’. An incredible feeling as the sound around you makes it feel you are in a cave.

It isn’t always easy…

When things ‘go wrong’ you have the opportunity to read the future, the way the wave is emerging as it breaks, and adjust your body and transfer that adjustment to the soles of your feet at the point where they make contact with the board. You, the board and the wave do the dance together. Sometimes, you may even take a tumble when you do ‘get it wrong’; other times you can make it over the lip of the wave and prevent taking a tumble to the depths where you know you will be ‘waiting for the light’ until you re-emerge on the surface, breathless and often unprepared for the next wave coming your way. After a few decent tumbles, some may say you learn to surf better.

Sharing the experience

If the surf is good you are rarely alone on the breaks. You have new friends, or good friends, with whom to paddle about, but ultimately the paddling and the surfing are your own personal experience and even if you catch the same wave, you are still surfing it in your own way. At any point you can step out and rest up on the shore.

Surfing the waves of Google+

Some days it just ‘works’ on Google+ too. You make send out posts that just seem to fly, you make make great connections, you have fun, and all in all life is great. Other days you lose your footing and you take a tumble. Whichever way, you gain experience; as you try different challenges, pushing your capabilities to the limit, there will be ‘changes’ to how you feel as some degree of re-organization (with a ‘z’ for my US friends) is what needs to occur when higher orders of complexity are experienced. The internal self-structure will also be restructuring during the process. When you can stop feeling ‘all at sea’ and start surfing the waves, life becomes a lot more enjoyable in this ongoing learning experience called the Plus. I use this surfing analogy all the time, even when getting ready to run a campaign on Google+ you are watching the surface of the water to sense the environment. You are getting your board waxed and at the ready, you are seeing whether anything will get in the way and prevent you having a chance to surf the waves; and then, during the whole process you take the opportunity, using every hashtag and trend, every meme, every news story, and many connections and relationships to enable the information to flow. The waves arise with the activity and the more your ‘carve your bottom turns’, the more you play with the face of the wave. Finally, at the end of the day you bring yourself back to the shore and reflect on how the campaign went, with the warm glow of knowing you did your best.

The kinds of innovation Google Glass will bring

CrowdOptic‘s developers are one of a handful of folks who are pushing new kinds of location features thanks to the new sensor platform that is known as Google Glass. Glass is the first consumer product that can share where you are looking. CrowdOptic does something similar by just using the cameras. Add the two together and I think we’ll see some wild new things that will only be possible with Glass. This video gives us a little taste.

Are you building anything? At Techcrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, coming up September 7, Rackspace and I going to have a Glass App developer’s contest. More on that after all the lawyers sign off on it. I’m off to Australia to meet with startups next week in Sydney. Hope to see you there!

How To Create A Successful Social Business

Are you a social business? By this, I mean are you aligning your social strategy to business goals? In a new Altimeter Group Report, “The Evolution of Social Business“, my co-author Brian Solis and I found that this was not the case. Only 34% of businesses we surveyed felt that their social strategy was connected to business outcomes. Brian goes into detail about our findings in this post.

Our research found that organizations typically go through six stages of social business evolution. But this doesn’t mean that you have to wait until Stage 6 to realize business impact. Rather, it’s not only possible but crucial to focus on achieving business results right from the very beginning. The six stages are as follows (for a deeper dive into each, please download the report):

A great example of this from the report comes from Shell. They launched the Shell Facebook presence only in January 2012 and they mostly post content on the page and moderate comments. But they see tremendous benefit from this activity because their business goal is to understand and improve their reputation with customers and partners. They ask the question, “To what extent is Shell meeting customers’ energy needs in socially and environmentally responsible ways?” The key here is that this is not an effort isolated to Facebook — they measure reputation across ALL media channels so that they can see their activities impact reputation differently. Moreover, they measure this DAILY. Shell may be early in their social business journey, but they make sure that they see business impact from their efforts.

Creating Your Social Business Strategy

The focus on business goals is the key to having a coherent social business strategy, which we define as “the set of visions, goals, plans, and resources that align social media initiatives with business objectives”. That alignment and focus on business objectives forms the foundation for the strategy, no matter where the organization is on their evolution. Just 28% of respondents in our survey felt that they had a holistic approach to social media, where lines of business and business functions work together under a common vision. A mere 12% were confident they had a plan that looked beyond the next year. And, perhaps most astonishing, only half of all companies surveyed said that top executives were “informed, engaged and aligned with their companies’ social strategy.”

But there is hope. we found a set of best practices common across all development stages. We call these the Success Factors of a Social Business: 

1. Define the overall business goal and align social media strategies against it.
2. Establish the long-term vision for becoming a social business.
3. Seek and earn key executive support and sponsorship based on the business case, not the trend.
4. Beyond marketing and service campaigns, develop a list of prioritized initiatives that will demonstrate business value at the enterprise-level and in key functions/lines of business and plot them on a two-to-three year roadmap.
5. Train and educate executives and employees not just how to use social media, but also how social media can impact business objectives and how to develop and run programs that do so continually.
6. Get the right people involved at the right levels. An effective social business strategy takes a unified approach with cross-functional support. It’s a combination of social media savvy and business acumen.
7. Invest in technology only after your vision and strategy are set. Technology and social media in general are only enablers to the overall mission and purpose you set forth.

Applying The Social Business Success Factors

From the research and from our work with clients, we have found that these success factors become especially important when the organization moves from one stage to the next. Some of the most common issues we’ve seen organizations face include:

• Getting executives to buy into the social strategy — and fund it. Factors #1 and #2 which use business goals and a common vision to align the organization, become crucial. Sometimes this can be accomplished with a short education session, but more often, it requires that social strategy be built into the very fabric of the executive’s work and priorities. This is done only by strongly linking social activities to the 3-5 strategic goals that executives care about. If social doesn’t help the executive accomplish their mission critical goals, then it won’t ever make it on to their radar.
• Creating a coherent strategy for social business. As crazy as it may sound, we’ve been working with clients to create three year roadmaps for their social business strategy. That’s not a typo, although it may seem impossible to do this in a fast-changing technology landscape. The key is to focus on the long-term strategic business goals of the organization and to make technology decisions ONLY after the vision and strategy are set.
• Establishing governance. This is the perennial question, “Who owns social media?” This isn’t a simple issue determined by company size, maturity, or industry. It’s base much more on how the organization sees social playing a role in the company in the future, and creating a roadmap to bridge the reality of today to the future. One organization we worked with envisioned a multiple hub-and-spoke model with product and country teams. But to get there, they realized they needed to be temporarily centralized first, move into a basic hub-and-spoke with defined responsibilities, and a migration path for governance to pass into the spokes in a few years after training ensures that the skills and capabilities are in place.
• Engaging and transforming the organization. This is perhaps the most challenging problem facing senior executives — they see the need to redesign and retool the organization for greater flexibility, adaptation to a changing landscape, and resilience in the face of increased competition. CEOs see social technologies as a way to harness and bring together employees, customers, and partners, but don’t have a roadmap to be able to do this.

By keeping in mind where you are in your social business evolution AND using the success factors, you’ll be able to start tackling some of these tricky issues. We’ve seen firsthand that this is not an easy journey, but it is one that you can successfully navigate. I’d love to hear how your journey is going — what stages are you in and have you encountered similar challenges? If so, how has our organization managed to move forward? Add your comments below or send me an email with details — we’re always looking for more case studies!

If you’d like to learn more about how Altimeter can help your organization move quickly and efficiently through the social business journey, please get in touch with us at sales@altimetergroup.com.