Do you find that you are dedicating a lot of time to mundane, manual tasks when it comes to social selling? Do you wish that you had some tools that could help you to spend more time focusing on the big-picture and less time wading into data entry?
Social selling is a long-term strategy that requires some commitment before results show and you’ll be able to realize ROI. On the plus side, once you have the system running, it’s the gift that keeps on giving! There are many daily social selling tasks that on their own don’t produce massive results. But in combination, they help you grow your reputation, establish relationships with your ideal customers, and establish your brand as an authority within your industry.
To get to that point, there are many different tasks that you have to complete on a regular basis to grow your following and establish a high level of awareness with your target audience. While it is possible to conduct all of these tasks by hand, this can be a time-consuming prospect. Instead, you should leverage tools that let you automate some of these tasks and free you up to engage in higher-level actions that push your growth forward.
In this article, we’ll outline some of the best social selling automation tools that are available today. These tools will not only help you to jump-start your social selling strategies and make you successful in less time, but they will help you to identify more opportunities in general. It’s impossible to monitor everything happening on social media as it relates to your industry. Using tools can help you to keep a closer eye on the discussions that are happening among your customers and influencers within your industry.
If you are looking to bolster your social selling strategies and create more opportunities, automating certain aspects of your social selling strategies is a must. With that said, let’s dive right in and explore some of these amazing helpers!
#1 Prospecting: LinkedIn Sales Navigator
One of the most important tasks of any social seller is to identify new prospects and engage with them on their favorite platforms. For B2B companies, that usually means (or at least involves) LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the world's largest professional social network with nearly 600 million users. That’s a lot of opportunity. But it can be tough to sift through. While LinkedIn’s standard search features are solid, LinkedIn Sales Navigator puts them on steroids and adds more options, ensuring that you are able to identify the perfect targets for your business.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you to target the right people and companies and better understand their desires and needs. Then, using the InMail credits that they provide (among other features), the subscription helps you engage with those prospects. Sales Navigator provides lead recommendations to help you quickly discover the decision-makers at your target accounts. It integrates directly with your CRM and transfers all prospect data, so you have it on hand in a single click.
For B2B social sellers, there are few tools that are more powerful than Sales Navigator. It’s a staple of any serious social selling strategy. By arming yourself (or your team) with a subscription to LinkedIn’s premium plan, you put your business in a position to reach more prospects, engage with them more effectively, and ultimately close more deals.
#2 Email Finder for Business Profiles: AeroLeads
AeroLeads is an email and phone finder software that helps you search for verified business emails of your leads.
AeroLeads is a powerful web-based Prospect Generation Software which not only finds relevant prospects but also finds contact details for them. All the data can be saved in your account, exported as well as transferred to other sites like SalesForce, Zapier, HubSpot, Mailchimp, etc. It is a powerful Prospecting and Sales Intelligence software that works with sites like LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and AngelList as well as you can upload your own lists.
#3 Content Sharing: reactor
Providing your following with a consistent stream of high-value content is a critical component of social selling. However, constantly working to identify great content that will appeal to your ideal customers can be difficult. Content curation isn’t as easy as it looks at face value. rFactr’s product, SocialPort, combines a number of useful features that you can use to drive your social selling strategies on the most popular platforms.
First, their CRM features. This software offers deep integration with the biggest CRM platforms. Through their system, you can add leads to your CRM, attribute revenue, track social sales activities, and sync your tasks with the people that you connect with. Then, the software helps you to identify content that will be a good fit for your audience through their customer recommendations. Last, you can schedule syndication of that content on all of your social media platforms.
rFactr’s more advanced plan, SocialPort Enterprise, also includes features like prospect tracking, competitor tracking, and training modules for your teams. SocialPort is an excellent tool for social sellers and a complement to sales teams that utilize social selling strategies.
#4 Social Post Scheduling: Buffer
In social selling, it’s extremely important that you are always sharing new information with your audience. You want a constant stream of insights, useful content, interesting thoughts, and general engagement coming from your account. However, nobody will be able to log into their accounts each day, identify things that they would like to share (that will actually be effective with your audience), and keep up with the fast-moving world of social media. Some automation is required to help keep your accounts active.
Buffer is the simplest solution out there today. Their software allows you to schedule your content and track the effectiveness of everything that you share across all of the popular social networks. Additionally, their system makes content recommendations based on RSS feeds and other content that you have shared, giving you a built-in resource for content curation.
Buffer lets you schedule your post for an exact date and time, then Buffer will automatically publish and track the post for you. All of your postings can be handled in one place, with manual updates sprinkled in. Just because you use automation tools, doesn’t mean that your content stream should look robotic!
#5 Relationship Intelligence: Nudge.ai
Nudge.ai is a platform that helps social sellers build relationships with their target audience. Sales have always been about building trust, and Nudge uses that premise as the foundation for its product. The software offers some basic categories, each incredibly important to social selling:
- Analytics. Relationship intelligence for social sellers. Includes automated CRM activity logging with no manual input required. Also includes buying committee coverage analytics which is incredibly valuable to account-based sales teams.
- Insights. Nudge’s system systematically facilitates warm introductions through your network. Their system will keep you on top of your relationships by alerting you to new connections, providing notifications for required follow-ups, and integrating directly with LinkedIn messages, Gmail, and Outlook to ensure that no conversations or relationships are neglected.
Nudge.ai simplifies the social selling process by ensuring that you have all of your conversations and contacts across multiple platforms, accessible from one place. They pull all of your contact information from your email, phone, meetings, sales, and CRM into one database so that you can keep a bird’s eye view of your social selling operations. Then, their system reminds you to follow up with your prospects with smart reminders.
#6 Social CRM: Nimble
Nimble is one part data repository and a one-part CRM for social sellers. Their system enables you to access up-to-date social media profile information, business data and verified contact data that helps you to get into contact with the prospects that you discover.
When you install the Nimble CRM, any time that you visit a social media profile, their system populates a sidebar with all of their relevant information including their other social media accounts, email, details that are publicly available about that person, and other pertinent information that you can use to engage with them.
Nimble also offers advanced social selling features like pipeline management, sales forecasting, analytics, and intelligent email tracking. Their system integrates directly with Office 365 and G Suite, ensuring that all of your communications with prospects are tracked and taken into account when sending follow-ups or designing strategies.
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#7 Social Listening: Meltwater
A big component of social selling is being able to identify trends as they develop and jump into conversations as they begin to unfold. This helps you get in front of your audience and position yourself at the forefront of your industry’s most popular conversations and topics. If you wait too long to jump in, the conversation can pass you by and it can become difficult to gain traction in these conversations, resulting in missed opportunities.
Meltwater aims to solve this problem. Their platform leverages local content partnerships and uses AI to sift through billions of documents in real time. They cut through the noise and provide you with actionable recommendations for identifying trends, jumping into conversations early in their time trending and it ensures that you position yourself appropriately within the conversation.
Meltwater can also help you monitor your brand across all social and digital channels from one convenient dashboard. Keep an eye on what your ideal audience is talking about across the world. News scanning isn’t just limited to social media either — Meltwater monitors conversations on niche forums and discussion boards around the web so that you never miss an opportunity to engage.
#8 Twitter Analytics: FollowerWonk
Twitter is a great platform for distributing content and getting in front of your ideal audience, but its minimalist profile can make it difficult to learn more about your audience. Obviously not ideal, since you want to engage with them. Followerwonk helps you dig deeper into your following and better understand your audience with their in-depth Twitter analytics. This tool can help you to find, analyze, and optimize your social selling strategies for growth.
Followerwonk stands out from the competition with its actionable visualizations that compare your social following to that of other influencers within your niche. Then, the software generates detailed analytics and reports that can easily be shared within your company with the click of a button.
If you want to leverage Twitter in your social selling strategy but are having a difficult time understanding your following and measuring your impact, Followerwonk is the perfect choice of tool.
#9 Email Identification: Hunter
Expanding the number of channels that you engage with prospects through is critical in social selling. You want to take that short Twitter conversation and turn it into a warm relationship that spans social networks and email and blossoms into a valuable relationship asset over time.
However, sometimes, it’s just about impossible to identify a prospect’s email on your own. Sure, you could ask them for it. Or use some Google magic to find where it is listed online, but that is time-consuming and tedious.
Instead, use Hunter! This tool scrapes the web and identifies the email addresses of your prospects. Using a Google Chrome extension, you can quickly identify the email of prospects and extend your relationship to a new channel. If Hunter can’t find their email, it analyzes other email addresses on the domain to give you a good shot at guessing what their email might be based on the format used with other email addresses.
#10 Custom Codeless Automation: Zapier
Zapier is a platform that is designed to extend the functionality of your apps by connecting them to other apps. By doing this, it lets you create and automate workflows between different software, which is extremely valuable for social sellers. You can create workflows with nearly any popular app and tie actions to actions in another app.
For instance — let’s say you want to store every incoming email to your sales team in a Google Sheet. Zapier could be used to automatically detect incoming emails and enter data on a specific Google Sheet for you, eliminating manual data entry for that task.
That’s just one example. Zapier offers connections between more than 1,000 apps at this time, making it easy for you to identify and automate workflows that take up hours of your time each and every week.
Social Selling Automation Makes You More Effective
Smart social selling automation frees up your time to focus on more important tasks, puts you in a position to identify new opportunities, and helps you to build more relationships with prospects more quickly than you would by hand. The tools mentioned in this article are some of the best tools available today for the different tasks that we have outlined in the article and some combination of these tools would be an excellent investment for any social seller.
What tools do you use to automate social selling? Tell us about some of your favorites in the comments section!
