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On this subject, here is an article about social selling: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
That’s Mark Twain describing our all-too-human tendency to cling to ideas that aren’t true. Don’t get me wrong – I’m as guilty as the next person. We all hold a few limiting beliefs. Some of the social selling myths listed below tripped me up for quite awhile. One of them still puzzles me.
But none of them are true. And so the sooner you – and I – can stop telling ourselves social selling is hard, or takes a lot of time, or requires an advanced degree, the sooner we’ll just get on with it. Perhaps, eventually … we’ll change our minds for good.
1. Social selling takes a lot of time.
Hours and hours, right? Maybe not. Melonie Dodaro of Top Dog Social Media broke out how to do social selling in 30 minutes with this handy infographic:
Want to save even more time? Kick your LinkedIn search skills up a notch. Zapier has a nice article on exactly how to do that.
The key here is to remember Rome wasn’t built in a day. Having a social presence takes time. Having a lot of connections takes time. You didn’t go home after your first week of work with a full Rolodex, did you? So don’t expect that to happen on social media.
2. You have to know a lot about social media to get started – or to be successful with it.
I have bad news. You’re never going to know all the details, tricks, and ninja moves of social selling. Neither am I.
Know why? Because there’s too much to know. And it changes weekly. And you still have a full-time job.
Social media is so vast and fast that there are people who don’t just specialize in one platform anymore. They specialize in one aspect of one platform – like Facebook advertising, or LinkedIn groups. And even these experts, who are super-smart people working 60+ hours a week, can barely keep up.
So please, if you’ve been studying social media, thinking you’ll get it all figured out before you jump in, please stop. Or actually … please start. Start by:
- Set up your profile pages on the major platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook). They don’t have to be perfect. Just get them good enough. You can go back and refine them later.
- Next, reach out to all the people you actually know. Like clients. Coworkers. Industry friends. These folks are basically your social media base. They’re the best people to connect with, and they’re also the most likely people to help you.
- Once you’ve got that down, start sharing really great, useful content. Mix it up: About half from your company and about half from industry resources.
By the time you get that far, you’ll have picked up some tricks and inadvertently made a few new connections. Your confidence will be stronger, and you’ll be able to learn stuff that’s actually useful rather than getting lost in the weeds.
At that point, if you want to know how advanced your social selling is, check out LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI). It will give you a score of how you’re doing on that platform.
The tool breaks your activity out into several categories. It even shows what you need to do to improve. So there’s the fourth thing to do: Follow that tool’s advice for how to improve.
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