Social Media Prospecting: Why and How to Use It?

Business growth often pushes sales and marketing teams to apply different tactics to attract leads. Social media prospecting is one such strategy and beneficial one. Why? For marketing and sales teams, it offers a vast pool of quality leads to be reached.

Read on to learn more about social prospecting benefits and how to apply this method right.

Why Use Social Media for Sales?

Before all, social prospecting is about using your social media profile and network to determine, research, and contact potential customers.

What are the benefits compared to other means of sales prospecting? Well, you can better understand the lead, offer great personalization, and have more control over capturing the lead.

Besides, it greatly supports other sales prospecting strategies. If you are applying outreach, you will use software for extraction of or access to contact information.

For instance, you can search for the executives’ details using the GetProspect companies database. Yet, for good personalization, you often need insights and details related to their operation. That’s what you can get by prospecting on this lead’s LinkedIn or Twitter page. With access to their post and professional experience, you can tailor a unique message.

How to Prospect on Social Media

At the same time, you can use any social media for sales as a separate strategy. How to get prospects, then? For this, you will need to clearly understand who to target, pick an appropriate platform, develop your profile, and focus on communication.

Take a look at the primary steps for using social media for sales prospecting:

Step1. Define and update your ideal customer profile.

First of all, you should clearly determine customer pain points, needs, budget, routine, tactics they use, and factors that affect their decision-making process. Also, you need to keep the profile updated, checking how the industry and the status of your leads change in regard to social media and sales.

Step2. Identify which platform suits your goals and profile.

It is no secret that LinkedIn is a perfect platform to find prospects in the b2b industry, while Instagram is pretty famous for eCommerce. Twitter and Facebook work great for both B2B and B2C if you put awareness and social media activity in the center. Pinterest is great for accessories and fashion, artists, and designers. Notably, each of them allows selling on social media, but LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook probably have the best features for social prospecting.

Step 3. Create a solid profile

The success of your social prospecting and networking depends on the profile you set. The reason is that it adds to the reputation and trustworthiness of you as a representative of a company or a seller. In this regard, you need to develop an image of an expert. Thus, fill out the necessary forms, and provide links to the work and case studies. Besides, actively post valuable materials and insert appealing photos.

Step 4. Study how you can help

Study the pain points of your leads and see how you can help them. In this regard, you should consider the business and niche the person operates. Moreover, it is essential to reflect on the common challenges and trends within the industry. Among leads, there is a constant urge for development and studying. Thus do polls, ask your current customers, do social listening, and know more about their needs.

Step 5. Offer value, not sell

Selling on social media contemplates that you develop relationships first. For it, you should start by offering value. It should not necessarily be your products or services but insights, guides, and expertise that would provide solutions or valuable data. That way, you are able to interest and hook the recipient and create an opportunity for subsequent communication.

Step 6. Connect with people

Once you define the problem and know the value to offer, develop a strong pitch for a first touch. Yes, there are limitations regarding the messages. Yet, be sure to introduce yourself, deliver value, and use it to build relationships. Sometimes, it is enough to get prospects who will later visit your profile, go to the website, and subscribe. However, often you will need to engage with and qualify the leads into prospects by asking questions upon connecting.

How to Find Prospects

Importantly, finding new prospects on social media is a challenging job. Do it daily and connect with those who seem to be interested. However, where to find prospects in various places and have higher chances of conversion?

Check these social prospecting tips to know:

• Post content to get reactions. Before all, being active on social media is crucial for  visibility and reach. It means sharing quality materials. There, you can leave links to the latest posts on your website and invite people to the funnel. Interestingly, LinkedIn will require case studies and stats, while LinkedIn is great for graphic and video content.
• Connect with those who interact with you. Once you get reactions to your posts or comments, be ready to write to the leads until their interest goes cold. Your approach will depend on the privacy settings of leads. On LinkedIn, you can use InMail or send DMs. The latter feature works on other platforms. Lastly, you can use email finders to extract emails or social media prospecting tools to scrape data or automate communication.
• Use advanced search, keywords, and hashtags. Finding new prospects also depends on how you search for information. For instance, LinkedIn has a solid search feature, allowing you to find people by job position, work, location, etc. Also, do not hesitate to search for posts and profiles by keywords and hashtags. It is an opportunity to start or participate in a discussion.
• Engage with prospects within groups and threads. Participate in discussions within groups, threads, and comment sections. After leaving an insightful comment or offering a solution, a lead can remember you. For you, it is an occasion to connect and provide more.
• Create communities. Moreover, you can develop your communities, having current clients as the basis of groups and sharing guides and recommendations with them. At some point, it can become a place where you will find quality leads that will come for education.

As a result, once you find leads who show interest in your content, response, message, or profile, be quick to send them a message or reply to their post. That way, a lead would remember you for a while. You can utilize this period to prepare a worthy pitch offering value.

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