We were really excited about putting this particular webinar together. Our CEO Jon Ferrara has known his co-presenter Jorge Soto for a while and they are both equally excited about developing relationships and helping others by sharing their knowledge.
Jorge has been in the startup community for a while and has been a part of many startups himself. One of them was acquired by Twitter where he then ran Inside Sales. He’s also been an advisor, coach for a number of accelerators, including General Assembly. He now has his own startup called FirstCut.io, a videography agency where he and his team specialize in on-demand customer testimonials.
Many readers of our blog are probably pretty familiar with Jon Ferrara’s entrepreneurial journey but for those that are not, here’s a quick summary: Jon is a pioneer and creator of Customer Relationship Management solutions. He created one of the very first CRMs (GoldMine) before Outlook and Salesforce even existed. He sold this company in the early 90’s and after ten years in retirement, he saw that none of the CRMs on the market was properly integrating social media. He understood how social and digital was going to change the game and created Nimble.
6 Strategies to More Effectively Use Social Media When Prospecting
Social Media has been around for many years now but there’s still a lot of people who are not sure how exactly to use it for business and generating leads. This is why Jorge put together the six strategies listed below:
- Build and Optimize Social Profiles and Share Related Content
- Determine ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
- Building Prospect List
- Analyze Prospect List
- Share, Connect, and Engage
- Sync to CRM, Analyze, and Repeat
We recorded our webinar with Jorge and Jon and you are more than welcome to watch it below:
If watching an hour-long webinar is not something that would work for you right now, please keep on reading as we summarize the entire content in this blog post.
Build and Optimize Social Profiles and Share Related Content
Jorge kicked the webinar off by stating the fact that individual salespeople can’t ignore social media anymore and have to incorporate it into their selling process. They have to break through the clutter and develop a personal brand.
Here are some of Jorge’s best tips that you can implement right now:
1. Pick Header and Image That Reflect Who You Are
– Add a professionally looking picture where you smile and look directly into the camera
– Your header should either show something that relates to you as a person or your company, see examples below:
Jon used a picture that he took while on a family vacation in Hawaii. He loves traveling and photography and his Twitter header reflects that. It also adds color to his Twitter profile and can be a great conversation starter.
Jorge chose to include his company’s logo as his background which helps his profile visitors know exactly what his company does and how it could potentially benefit them.
2. Optimize Your Bio For Keywords
– One of the most important things about your bio is to be able to optimize your profile for keywords
– Jorge is using his previous experience at @MoPub and @Twitter to add credibility to his profile and show his experience in the space
– It’s important to always link directly to the companies that you are referring to by putting “@” before the name of the company that you want to drive your audience to because Twitter is using an algorithm on the back-end to look for keywords, people, and user IDs to figure out who is the influencer around these keywords or topics
– Another important thing that a Twitter bio should include is what is it that you and your company do
– Jorge is also utilizing hashtags in his Twitter bio. This is important because Twitter is using an algorithm on the backend to look for keywords and people and user IDs to figure out who is the influencer around these keywords or topics
– Jorge’s company is trying to become the thought leader around the topics like #VideoContent, #VideoMarketing or #Saas so they make sure to include them in their bios and the content they share. All your company members should be optimizing their Twitter profiles for these keywords.
What Jorge and his company are doing is that they are positioning themselves as trusted advisors in these areas. If you click on the hashtag #VideoMarketing in his Twitter bio, you will see that his company is featured on top of the search. If you scroll through the feed, you will see a lot of content Jorge and his company share with these hashtags. They are consistently putting themselves in front their target audience and positioning themselves as thought-leaders in the industry. They also make it easy for people to get in touch with them directly from this Twitter search by including their website on their profiles.
Additionally, this information is being indexed across the web. As Jorge puts it:
“We live in the age of big data and almost every reasonable company these days has some sort of a crawler out there looking at and analyzing data across the web, including this kind of info, since it’s a public page. This kind of activity is not benefiting you only on Twitter but across the entire web.”
Jorge and his team also make sure that they go through these hashtag streams and regularly engage with the people passionate about this kind of content.
Jorge recommends that every salesperson and SDR (Sales Development Representative) dedicate an hour or two every day to prospect on social media and create lists of prospects and bring them into your CRM system.
3. Add Additional Info to Your Profile
– Twitter allows you to link to your company as well as use certain plugins, Jorge’s profile includes the following:
– You also have the option to lead people to other places besides your website: like your LinkedIn profile, your company blog or your personal blog
4. Use a Pinned Post
- It’s a great way to generate likes and retweets on the posts that you want to put in front of people, ex. A webinar you are hosting, great press mention about your company, any kind of content that you would like to highlight
- Jorge suggests that you rotate these posts often, he likes to use video as it attracts people’s attention much more than a regular tweet or an image
*Remember: this post will be the first thing someone sees when they open your profile, so make sure it’s something that represents you well and draws people in.
5. Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile
- Make sure that you have filled out the entirety of your profile and that you are constantly posting content to attract engagement.
- Add keywords to your “Featured Skills” and get others to endorse you. This will increase the chances of your profile to surface when such keywords are searched.
Determine ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
- Categorize the Account
- Use keywords to categorize and describe your company and its goals.
- Determine what department you’re focusing on.
- List keywords that people in your target market are using. This will be crucial to find customers on social media using hashtags.
- List the possible titles of your target customers.
- Lastly, list the people who your team should make the initial connection with.
- Provide Info to Your SDRs About SpecificsList details including:
- Uses of your product
- Product descriptions
- Your target company region? Size? Which different technologies do they use? What are the investment levels?
- Start Prospecting with Nimble!
Building Prospect List
- Use the Nimble browser plug-in to create a prospect list
- Nimble allows you to find the contact info you need by simply hovering over the name of the person or company you want. You can now easily create a list including phone numbers, emails, social profiles, and company information.
- Use online databases such as Crunchbase to find companies that fit your ICP. You will be able to use Nimble on any social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) site and websites. Even in news articles!
- Tags in Nimble help to make specific lists.
Ex. If you want to contact start-up companies specific to social media marketing you can tag “SMM Start-up” when you add their contacts into Nimble.
Analyze Prospect List
You can now go through your lists on Nimble and begin reaching out and creating connections. By using different data points Nimble allows you to create personalized group emails that have proved to have nearly 50% opened rates.
Share, Connect and Engage
Now you have your list in Nimble and can enrich each record with social data by clicking on them. Once you do so, Nimble will start suggesting people’s social networks allowing you to build complete digital records for all your contacts. Start going through people’s Twitter streams and share, like and comment on their content. Always remember to try to add value to their shares and don’t be shy to start a conversation. Engaging with your prospects’ content prior to sending an email or calling them will increase your chances of them recognizing you and welcoming you with open arms.
Sync to CRM, Analyze, and Repeat
Does you SDR work in spreadsheets instead of using the Nimble browser extension to build people into your CRM right away? No worries. Save you spreadsheet as a csv file and import directly into Nimble!
You now have all the tools to work smarter, better, faster and take your prospecting to the next level! Check out our offers below and don’t hesitate to reach out and ask questions. We’re looking forward to hearing from you at [email protected] 😉
This post has been written with the help of our Social Media Marketing intern, Ben Goodman. Thanks, Ben! 😉
