Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

To get a better understanding of which types of content salespeople are consistently sharing on their social media channels, we analysed all the top shared posts on our platform over the last 12 months to see under which large content “umbrella” they could be categorised.

The three macro-groups of content we identified were:

1. Company promotion – 49%

2. Thought leadership – 34%

3. Company culture – 17%We then decided to get more granular.

We identified a number of sub-themes within each group, divided as follows:

Company Promotion

Campaign promotion – content related to the company’s marketing campaigns – 24%

Informative blogpost – any informative and useful article from the company’s blog (not linked to a specific campaign, offer or data-capturing page) – 12%

Events – content related to a specific event sponsored or organised by the company – 7%

Company news/PR – media coverage or exciting company news – 6%...

If you haven't started incorporating social media into your sales process, you're not alone. According to a survey from PeopleLinx, only 31% of sellers currently use social to sell.
But a quick look at the data backing social selling indicates that the trend will only get stronger in the years to come. For instance, 79% of salespeople who actively engage on social media outperform their peers, and over half of buyers consult social channels as part of their research processes -- up from 19% in 2012.

While there's no shame in not being a social seller today, salespeople who refuse to join the party will get left behind in the near future. Need some convincing? Check out the data in the following infographic from Sales For Life. Better to join the ranks of social sellers late than never.

In recent years, psychologists and behavioral economists have shown that our emotional decisions are neither irrational nor irresponsible. In fact, we now understand that our unconscious decisions follow a logic of their own.

They are based on a deeply empirical mental processing system that is capable of effortlessly processing millions of bits of data without getting overwhelmed. Our conscious mind, on the other hand, has a strict bottleneck, because it can only process three or four new pieces of information at a time due to the limitations of our working memory.

Social media has been traditionally known for it's "soft selling" approach, meaning most users are not online for the sole purpose of shopping and, therefore, they must be persuaded in a different way. What does that mean for you? How do you "sell" through social media without causing your followers and friends to get tired of your overly aggressive tactics? The answer is in what you post and how you post it. Learn more below about effective social media sales strategies you can use to increase sales and keep your audience happy.

...What I love about today’s Content We Love example is twofold. The company issuing the survey results, Videology, is doing a great job of promoting a piece of their own content by surfacing the newsy elements, writing a really good press release, adding an infographic and distributing the whole package to the media.

(Link to the release: Heavy Video Viewers 57% More Likely to Spend on Holiday Gifts)

However, the way the PR team packaged the story will help direct resulting any news coverage advantageously for the brand....

Great news, marketers! A new infographic from Docurated shows that the work you do pays off: 83% of companies cite high-quality content as a top driver of winning new customers.

But there's a slight glitch in the baton handoff to Sales. Those awesome pieces you're putting out? Reps can't find them.

According to the infographic, 58% of surveyed organizations agreed that speed of RFI and RFP responses is important to signing new contracts. But unfortunately, salespeople are slowed by disorganization: 65% said the ability to quickly find content was a major sales pain point. The infographic also notes that sales reps can spend up to six and a half hours per week searching for the content they need....