Social media platforms not only keep you connected with family and friends, but can also help you reach more people and grow your brand online. Through social media, you can: 

• Observe your competitors and their best practices
• Create content for your target audiences 
• Share content like blogs and other media from your own website 
• Introduce your products and services 
• Increase sales through social selling 

Social media has become a vital part of our 21st century lifestyle, with social channels showing no sign of decline in popularity and prominence. In response, it is more important now than ever to plan on utilizing social media as a critical tool in growing a business. 

What is social selling? 

Social selling is a modern approach to sales that allows brands to hyper-target prospective customers while simultaneously establishing rapport with existing audiences. It focuses on the practice of building relationships through interacting with users and providing relevant, helpful content instead of cold pitching and spamming your messages into the online abyss. 

3 Reasons Why Social Selling is Beneficial for Your Brand 

1. Increases brand visibility – Continuously sharing relevant, helpful content will attract prospective audiences willing to engage with you. No brand visibility means no exposure to potential customers and opportunities.
2. Drives higher-quality leads – To go along with brand visibility, higher-quality leads come from investing your time and energy into building genuine connections with prospective audiences and gaining their trust. 
3. Credibility – Build social credibility within your industry via social media networks to nurture relationships and connect with prospective customers. Position yourself to have influence and increased levels of perceived value among users.  

How To Measure Social Selling  

The social selling index (SSI) is a metric used to measure the impact of a brand’s social selling efforts. It determines how well you are: 

1. Establishing a professional brand with a well-managed profile. 
2. Finding the right people on the platform. 
3. Sharing relevant, conversation-inspiring content. 
4. Building and strengthening relationships. 

LinkedIn first introduced the concept of the SSI and combines four components to establish a score. To find your LinkedIn SSI score, sign into your account and navigate to your Social Selling Index dashboard. 

Twitter is also a great network for social selling. Twitter Lists make it possible to group users together, based on company, industry or geographical location to monitor their specific content. Key Twitter Lists to focus on when social selling on the platform includes existing customers, prospective customers and competitors. 

Instagram can be utilized for social selling by tracking engagement with your content relative to your follower count. This can be measured using Sprout Social, a software that allows you to easily manage your social media accounts. Within Sprout, navigate to the Reports tab and under Instagram Reports, click Instagram Business Profiles, where you can find your engagement rate calculated at the bottom of the Overview tab. 

Facebook engagement can be measured using Facebook Audience Insights, where the metrics can be found under the Content tab. And in Creator Studio, overall engagement numbers can be found under the Insights tab while the post-level ones can be found under the Published tab.