5 ways to make your social media a sales machine

Aseem Badshah

Aseem is the Founder and CEO of Socedo, a web platform that helps to automate prospecting on Twitter and LinkedIn.

He's been a leader in the social media marketing space for more than 8 years. Before Socedo, Aseem founded Uptown Treehouse, a marketing agency for Fortune 500 brands focused on social media.

You can learn more from Aseem at blog.socedo.com.

Recruiting the goods

Before you can even consider hiring

someone, you need people to be interested

and apply. This is what we in the biz like to

call “recruiting.” Never recruited talent

before? These tips will help you fill your

pipeline with qualified candidates.

Write a good job description. First things

first—make sure you have an accurate and

clear job description that will attract good

talent. Be sure to include all the necessary

qualifications so that people can weed

themselves out before applying, and use

phrases that will resonate with potential

applicants like “self-directed”, “team-player”

and “organized”.

Intro

Staffing is one of the toughest, yet most important tasks in your business. Your staff interacts closely with your clients and has a dramatic impact on your clients’ success. Their actions and their personalities shape your culture, your brand, and the very health and success of your business.

It begins with the initial hire but it definitely doesn’t end there—each of the many components of staffing carries weight.

In this guide we’ll go over how to recruit, hire, train, incentivize, retain, and even terminate employees.

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Social selling

Build your client base with social media

1. Find your target audience

With 72% of all web users active on social media, your potential customers are out there,

and they come with a wealth of information. A single Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram profile

contains the customer’s name, location, interests, and community of peers—think about

what you can learn based on who they follow, and who follows them. More importantly,

social media provides real-time updates about customer behavior, whether they’re tweeting

about yoga, asking their friends if anyone knows a good personal trainer, or uploading

pictures of their first guitar.

Know what social media sites your client base is using the most. The Pew Research Center

has some great data about the demographics on different sites. Then build out a list of

keywords and hashtags your ideal customer would be using in relation to your services,

and search for your audience based on this list.

be a customer! A client who is top of

their class, stays late, and asks a lot of

questions might be hungry for more.

After conquering all the skills they can

as a client, they might want to move to

mastery by teaching. Since they’ve

been working with you for a while, you,

your staff, and your clients already know

them well and ramp-up will be a lot

quicker.

Also, if you need a manager, sometimes

the best candidates are your

employees—you already know them

and they know your business. Internal

promotions also provide a career path

option and are a great incentive for

employees to stay with you long-term.

Set an example. “Good leaders attract

good people,” says Matt Sharp, owner of

CrossFit Maximus. If you set a great

example and are the best leader you

can be, you’ll attract people with the

traits you want. By building a solid,

positive business environment—space,

culture, values, staff, clients—talent will

come to you. Conduct regular check-ins

with your current employees to see what

their job satisfaction is. In the same way

that happy customers talk to their

friends, so too do happy employees sing

your praises, so strive to become a

place that people want to work!

Look for talent within. Often times the

best talent comes from somewhere

within your own business. It may even

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2. Discover a new customer persona

Businesses grow because they find new markets. The great thing about social media is

that you can see who is interested in your service. You may be surprised! While targeting

the audience you already know will be interested in you, make sure to pay attention to

the types of customers who engage with your content. Who is retweeting you, sharing

your pins, and commenting on your Facebook updates? Continue to update that list of

keywords, hashtags, and bios when you see positive trends.

You’ll also learn what your customers are talking about and how they are finding you and

your services. Social listening is all about being aware of your position in the community,

and it’s as easy as tracking hashtags about your brand and active users in your space.

Glassdoor.com, Craigslist, your

community’s Online Job Boards, and

local Colleges and university’s job

board.

Social media. It may seem an odd place

to look for employees but you can

accomplish almost anything via social

media now. You can share job postings

or look into a potential candidate as well

as these other Small Biz Tips for Social

Media Recruiting. Many people have

found their dream jobs and vice versa

through the power of social media.

Social selling

Use employee referrals. If already you

have good employees, they can be your

best referral resource. You can trust

them to know good candidates. If your

employees are people you trust, they

will bring in people that they know will fit

with your team and culture. Your

employees are already “selling the

dream” of working for your business,

therefore shortening your hiring cycle.

Job boards. In such a competitive job

market, you’ll need to take a

multi-pronged approach to hiring. There

are many job listing websites out there

and, depending on your industry, you

can even find sites targeted to your

business. But good overall places

include Career Website Pages like

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3. Make them notice with content

It’s one thing to find your customers, but to keep them engaged, you need to make yourself valuable, or at least interesting, for the time they spend on social media. Consistently sharing content, from blog posts to inspiring quotes to interesting articles, is the best way to keep yourself on the forefront of your customers’ minds. T.A. McCann of Rival IQ advocates a 5-3-2 rule for social media content. Out of every 10 tweets, Facebook updates, or other posts, five should be content from others, relevant to your audience, three should be content from you, and two should be something personal and non-work related.

Social media is about being social. Too many brands use it as their personal billboard to promote their services. Keep your community interested in who you are, and they’ll turn to you first when they’re ready to become customers.

Social selling

Things you also need to check off your list…

Can they handle group classes?

They might be a great 1-on-1 trainer, but coaching group classes requires a very different set of

skills.

Can they handle pressured situations?

They have to be able to respond quickly and figure out what to do without showing your

clients any weakness or doubt. Nothing is a big deal unless they make it a big deal. Are they

able to call audibles in class, quickly create solutions, and execute? This is key in scaling

options for injuries, inabilities, or a class plan of 10 members that jumps to 25 in the next class.

The coach must quickly adjust and adapt their floor and workout tactics with a smile.

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Social selling

Do they know how to troubleshoot?

Your coaches face challenges large and small thrown at them daily by clients. If your

coaches face a situation that they can’t quickly identify, analyze, and solve, your clients lose

faith in the coach and your business.

Do they have social awareness and social acuity?

Your coach might be teaching a great class and say something they think is hilarious. But

what if it’s offensive to a member? Generally, coaches who do this have a pattern of doing

so, thereby losing respect among members. The coach needs to have that special set of

skills to read the room.

Even worse than a bad-joke-coach are coaches who believe yelling and reprimanding adults

is the proper way to gain respect and control. I recommend the book How to win friends and

influence people as well as anything on NLP—Neuro Linguistic Programming.

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Social selling

And, of course, always check your gut.

Where there is doubt, there is no doubt. While instructing people is the #1 task of most coaches,

don’t forget that they need to fit and reinforce your culture while representing your brand

properly. If anything seems off, don’t make the hire! The wrong staff can cause irreparable

damage to your business. Do your homework!

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Learn more about how you can manage your business, call Front Desk at 855.417.7108