Best Ways to Engage on Social Media

For many people, where they live digitally is not reading transactional, cold marketing emails. In fact, in a study done by the UK company pure property finance, “…the average worker has an average of 651 unread emails in their inbox.” We would argue that “meeting buyers where they live digitally” would also exclude calling prospects who have not requested a phone call. On average only 2% of cold calls resulted in an appointment set with a prospect. Unless you are focusing on annual contract values of $10,000 or more and have multiple sales development representatives simultaneously dialing, cold calling may not be the most effective form of lead generation. 

With social networking user numbers growing 9%+ each of the last two years to 3.805 Billion users in 2020, we are seeing that more people are ‘digitally living’ to engage on social media. Knowing that there is attention on social media than ever before, how, as salespeople, can we tap into that attention? How as salespeople can we find ways to engage on social media?

In terms of “engagement” we mean truly spending time manually engaging with other people’s content on social media. If this scares you away, GOOD! This strategy is not for everyone. Some might be wondering… “What about posting content? I heard that if I just post 3 posts every 36 hours with 12 hashtags for 6.7 months that I will get 10,000 followers and a percentage of those followers will automatically buy my stuff!” 

While I am not suggesting to never post content, I am suggesting that posting content alone is an inefficient lead generation strategy. You need to engage on social media and It must be coupled with authenticity.

When posting content you are not guaranteed that anyone will see your post. With over 250 million+ stories and photos posted every day on Instagram alone, adding a specific hashtag will not spike your visibility. Because of the sheer volume of posts going up daily, you are not guaranteed to show up on your own followers’ feed with your content much less introduce yourself to new prospects via your content. By posting content as the only means of generating interest in your brand, you are putting your success to chance by relying solely on the algorithm to serve your posts to the right people at the right time. 

We hear the phrase “beat the algorithm” tossed around as if users truly have that ability. Spoiler alert: Billions of dollars have been poured into “the algorithm”; you will not beat it. You will be subjected to following the algorithm’s agenda for your profile. Below are the best ways to engage on social media.