How to use social listening
to boost sales

We all know that social selling is the future of business. But, many people are still relatively new to this concept and how it can be applied. If you’re not already using social media for selling, here are five ways you can get started.

For starters, social selling is the process of using social media to connect, interact, and build relationships with prospects and customers. This strategy will help you create relationships with buyers who are interested in what you have to say. It will also boost your credibility by demonstrating that you are interested in what they are interested in.

Social listening tools enable social selling by making it easier to gather invaluable information. Social listening tools, which can also be known as “social monitoring” tools, allow you to keep an eye on user’s sentiments, trends, and attitudes. It may also help identify opportunities to introduce your products or services to that audience based on their needs. 

For example, with paid ad campaigns you can target by interests and demographics but not by immediate need or intent, whereas social listening identifies opportunities where user’s are actively seeking out your products or services and this enables social selling.

Below are five tools you can use for social selling:

#1 Linkedin Sales Navigator:

Linkedin Sales Navigator is a tool which allows you to filter down all of Linkedin’s active user base by criteria such as:

• Job title
• Industry
• Company or department headcount 
• Seniority 
• Location

There’s additional account filter options which can help customize your search like whether the company has had a funding event in the last 12 months, or the percentage growth rate of a particular department, whether they’ve posted on Linkedin in the past 30 days or even the technology a company is using. 

For example, if you specifically wanted to target CTOs from companies with 200-500 employees in the United States, which have had 20%+ growth in their engineering team, you could do that with Linkedin Sales Navigator.

#2 Awario:

Awario is a social listening tool which monitors brand mentions and keywords from across the internet. Unlike other social media monitoring software that rely on a single third-party data provider, Awario crawls over 13 billion web pages daily, in addition to the APIs it pulls information from.

You can use Awario to find relevant conversations happening across multiple social networks and you can join them in real time.

You add a list of keywords or phrases that you want to track and it creates a feed of anywhere those keywords are mentioned across Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, blogs, news sites and the web.

It even has a bullion search function so you can be very specific with your searches.  

#3 TexAu:

TexAu is a marketing automation platform on steroids. Unlike other automation tools like Phantom Buster which run single commands, TexAu allows you to build multiple automations into a funnel, which allows for multiple client touch points across multiple platforms. 

There are 180+ automations across 10+ platforms available and the team are constantly adding new features and tools. 

You can automate processes across Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Slack, Quora, Youtube, Reddit, Pinterest, Yellow Pages, Google, Product Hunt and more.

For example, you can use TexAu to scrape a list of prospects from Linkedin Sales Navigator, automatically find their corporate email address and feed it into a Lemlist email campaign. 

#4 Sparktoro:

Founded by Rand Fishkin who also founded Moz, one of the world’s most powerful SEO tools, SparkToro allows you to instantly discover what your audience reads, watches, listens-to, and follows online.

It’s like a search engine for user preferences and gives you access to previously impossible-to-get data about any online audience’s attributes, behavior, and sources of influence.

You can search by a keyword related to your audience and their interests and SparkToro will show you which podcasts that audience listens to, the Youtube channels they subscribe to, which sites they frequent, Twitter accounts they follow and much more.

#5 Feedly:

Feedly creates categorized RSS feeds from your hand picked list of sources. Powered by AI, it tracks insights across the internet so you don’t have to read everything and flags the important insights from everywhere, including news sites, blogs, Twitter and newsletters. 

With powerful collaboration tools, it has intuitive ways to share insights with other team members. 

All five of the above tools offer either a 2-4 week free trial with no credit card required or have a free subscription tier so you can test them out without risk.

Shoestring Services is not affiliated with any of these platforms, we just wanted to share the love.