Over the past several months, social selling has become the hottest topic in social media. Depending on who’s talking it’s either the pinnacle of modern marketing or a cynical repackaging of social marketing hype. So what exactly? is social selling, why is it trending, and how is it any different from the waves of social media trends that have washed over the web in the past few years?
Read moreSocial Marketing vs. Social Selling: What’s the Difference?
Content is King and if you want your brand to stay a step ahead of the rest, then it’s important? to avoid these common pitfalls.
LinkedIn has owned the spotlight for business-oriented social media for a long time. Twitter can be leveraged as a continuing news feed and to engage with thought leaders. Facebook is a great platform to showcase a company’s culture, engage existing customers and advertise products. But LinkedIn is considered the crème de la crème of professional networking, helping professionals craft meaningful business relationships and share content that resonates with prospects. Does anyone even use Google+?
Yes, Google+ is still a relevant platform, and it may become a lot more relevant as frustration grows with LinkedIn noise and increasing spam.
One of the most common questions I get asked is “How frequently should I post?” How much is too little? How much is too much?
Twenty years ago when I was a couple of years out of college and dreaming up my first startup, the commercial Internet was just getting off the ground. I worked as a news editor and journalist at a mid-size daily newspaper and had access to the Internet through a Mosaic browser, where I could read the first online newspaper called The Nando Times. All of the market analysis at the time focused on content business models for the web, which is when I first heard the old saw “Content is King”. Twenty years of mind-bending evolution later, we’re still saying the same thing as if learning it for the first time. It’s time to move on.
The story that several HubSpot customers and prospects tell is that once they were attracted as an inbound lead, they were handed over to a high-pressure and highly scripted inside sales process.
Successful social marketers offer links to objective content that is relevant to their customers, they offer their own insights on articles they read and share with the community, and they respond to the discussions that are driving engagement without relying on automatic responders.
The key to enabling your partners for social marketing is to provide a stream of relevant content that makes it easy for partners to select, personalize and share in a way that helps them authentically build their own voice and brand.
Your job is to give partners the tools, the content, and the support they need to generate leads more efficiently and effectively than they’re doing on their own—or with other vendors.
Visibility into partner performance means seeing how partners are marketing, what kinds of reaction they’re getting, what kind of market influence they can generate, and what quality of leads they can produce.