In Late August I sat in on the Sysomos “Generating Leads through the Social Stream” webinar. The webinar was led by Mark Evans and Nygel Weishar. I thought the webinar was very well done with a focus on educating participants rather than a sales pitch on the Sysomos tools. I find ‘the learn’ versus ‘the tell’ model a better way to share content and it is one that we try at VA Partners. The webinar was a more consumer based than Business to Business, but I think there are still many great insights for B2B focused organizations. Generating leads through social media is a relatively untapped aspect of B2B sales and marketing. Based on this recent webinar, I’ve put together some tips to help you reach clients in a new way.
The full webinar has been recorded and can be found on the Sysomos website.
The Power of Social Media to Drive Sales
Social media is many things, including a tool for inbound marketing leads. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and LinkedIn can help people find your content and drive them to your blog and website. This may drive them to reach out with a request to learn more about your company and offerings. This could be through a white paper download, signing up for the newsletter, and ideally engaging someone at your firm about an opportunity. This method does work; for example, I have two meetings with opportunities where the first touch point with the prospect was with social media.
Social Media is not About the Hard Sales
You can’t be too pushy on social media. This is especially hard for sales people just getting started on Twitter as an example. I have found the best strategy is to provide advice and feedback and create an online relationship before trying to engage about a sales opportunity.
Know Your Audience
This is one of the key components to any sales and marketing strategy and applies to social media as well. Are your prospects and customers on social media and if so which platforms? Many startups have limited time to invest in social media for focus on the key segments. Our two favourite platforms are Twitter and LinkedIn. This is where we spend our time and efforts. For other organizations, Facebook and Youtube might be a better fit. Our recent blog post, The Medium is the Message and how it applies to our social media efforts, by Stephanie Goodman highlights the differences between some of the different platforms.
The There E’s
Engage, Entertain, and Educate: This was a gem shared by Mark Evans during the presentation and provides his high level view on how to use social media.
So at the end of the day, was the Sysomos webinar, Generating Leads through the Social Stream successful? I think you will need to ask Sysomos for their feedback, but from a sample size of one (me), it appears to be. I thought the content was interesting enough to write a blog about it which will ultimately be shared to thousands of people through Twitter, LinkedIn, company newsletter, and our blog. I also plan to demo their social media monitoring tool.
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