Salespeople who are active on social media are more likely to hit their quarterly goals.
Employee advocacy can help salespeople be active on social media. Through your program, you can guide your sales team towards activities they should carry out, such as hopping in relevant conversations, connecting with industry analysts, and sharing content with their target audience.
Today, salespeople who practice social selling see 45% more opportunities than those who don’t and are 51% more likely to hit their quota, according to LinkedIn.
But your salespeople should be active on social media on their own. If they completely rely on your employee advocacy program, they won’t be successful. Employee advocacy should be an additional component of your social selling strategy.
You should train your salespeople on social media best practices and why employees should be active. Let’s break down what they should do on social media and what you can do with GaggleAMP to enable your salespeople.
Align Your Program Strategy With The Goals of Sales
The activities you request your salespeople carry out should be put in the Gaggle to help your salespeople hit their goals.
The first step in doing this is knowing their goals. Of course, all salespeople want to close deals. They want more leads and opportunities to drive revenue. But there is more to it than that.
Your salespeople want to look credible on social media. They want people in your industry to look to them as a valuable and knowledgeable resource to turn to. And just like anyone else on social media, your salespeople like getting a boost in engagement. They want people to comment on their posts, they want to get likes, and increase follower counts.
By supplying salespeople with content their target audience likes, they’ll get more engagement from that audience. Again, salespeople need to be active on their own, but your employee advocacy program can help supply them with content, suggest people for them to connect and engage with, and identify conversations they should get involved in.
Build Your Followers
Your salespeople could share all the great content they want, but it’ll be tough to draw in the right people if they don’t build their audience.
Sure, your posts could still be found through hashtags and search terms, but salespeople need to take the time to build out their followers and connections. They can do this by sending connection requests on LinkedIn, following people they find interesting, and getting involved in threads and conversations online.
If you don’t build out your followers, then your immediate audience will not be people you’re interested in drawing in.
For example, let’s say you have a junior salesperson in your Gaggle who hasn’t drawn in followers from their target audience. You could have this person share a ton of great content that’s relevant to prospective buyers, but this person’s followers are completely made up of people they went to high school and college with and maybe some former coworkers.
That’s not going to take your social selling efforts where you want them to go. This is another reason why your salespeople need to be active on social media on their own but leverage your employee advocacy program as an additional piece to their efforts.
They should connect with prospective buyers, all of your customers, industry analysts and influencers, and other people who are interested in your industry and what your brand offers.
Share The Right Content
Salespeople should share both branded and third-party content that is relevant to their industry and pique the interest of their target audience.
You want to share content to boost the credibility of your salespeople, gain interest from your target audience, drive traffic to your site, and drive leads. Not all your content should be branded content.
Use Third-Party Content
You want to mix it up with third-party content too simply because you don’t want your employees to always be talking about your brand, and honestly, they don’t either. Of course, third-party content won’t drive traffic to your website, but it will make your salespeople look credible.
Third-party content can be industry news, a recent research report, or content that covers common trends or challenges of your industry. Content curation can be a time-consuming and challenging process, but it’s much easier with the built-in content feeds you can associate with your GaggleAMP account. Simply grab a Twitter user, list, or hashtag, a LinkedIn or Facebook page, or even an RSS feed, attach it to the Channel, and submit. From there, any content associated with that request will automatically come into your GaggleAMP account.
It’s easy to find content from your own brand, but GaggleAMP’s Channels make routine research for third-party content much easier.
Post in the Right Voice
The content salespeople share should look like it’s coming from them. Don’t have them just reshare brand posts. If it looks like they shared the content and wrote the caption, the post will look much more authentic. You can make captions editable when you suggest them to them so they can make it sound more like them.
Track Your Performance
When sharing content from your Gaggle, you should use unique links and UTM tracking to measure your progress. How many people who became leads visit your website through your Gaggle? Unique links will help you track that and show the value of your Gaggle.
A very popular GaggleAMP feature that your salespeople will like is the scheduler function. Instead of sharing content right when they get a notification from the Gaggle, employees can schedule posts to go out whenever they want. They can also schedule when in the week they’ll receive notifications about additions to the Gaggle if they don’t want to get notified every day.
Scheduling is helpful on the Manager's side too. The Gaggle Manager can load up the Gaggle all in one sitting with multiple activities such as liking a post, connecting with people, and sharing posts. They can have those activity requests go out to Gaggle Members throughout the week rather than all at once.
The strength of employee advocacy is it helps your employees present themselves as credible and authentic on social media. It helps get them active by helping them experience the personal benefits of growing their presence and people engaging with their posts. When your salespeople are part of an employee advocacy program, it will do the same for them.
If you’d like to learn more about how employee advocacy can support your social selling efforts, be sure to download our one-pager on How Salespeople Should Leverage Employee Advocacy or contact your Customer Success Manager.
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