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Audio Transcript:

Here’s your social selling tip of the day for February 23, 2020. I’m Greg Hyer of Linking into Sales.

When I was a kid, my grandmother would clip articles and comics out of the newspaper and mail them to me. She thought I would find them interesting and most of the time I did. Today, we can do the same thing, only much faster and at scale. We could send an email, use a chat platform, send a text or use social media.

Since this tip is for social sellers, let’s focus on how we can use social media to quickly get someone’s attention.

Most social networks have a mention feature. A mention is when you “tag” them or link their profile to their name in your update. The rules vary across platforms but most only allow you to mention someone that is directly connected to you or that person has made a comment to an update that you can see. Twitter would be the exception. It doesn’t matter if you’re following someone or not, you can mention them or tag them in a photo. However, they may not be notified if they are not following you.

On LinkedIn mentions can be helpful when giving someone public recognition. You can also mention someone in a public update in an effort to get their attention. Sometimes I will use this tactic to encourage someone to read an article I’ve shared because we had a conversation on a similar topic.

LinkedIn mentions can be very helpful to bring a group of your connections together in a public update. This promotes others connecting on the professional networking platform. This could help you improve your social proximity and build social capital.

LinkedIn has lifted the limitation of who you can mention in an update. Unless that user has adjusted their privacy settings, this is fair game. You are limited to mentioning 20 people or companies at a time in an update from your profile or in a group.

Try this. Find an article you think a prospect would enjoy engaging in. For this tip, I recommend using an article that isn’t from your company blog. Start to share your status update by mentioning them (remember to use the @ symbol to properly tag them), and include some insight you want them to note. See what happens. Did they eventually engage with you? Keep practicing this tactic, but don’t over do it. You could appear spammy. Don’t be spammy.

That does it for this social selling tip of the day. In addition to this daily tip, check out the Social Selling Podcast by Linking into Sales on iTunes, Google Play Music, Stitcher, YouTube and Tunein. You can even ask Alexa to play the Social Selling Podcast by Linking into Sales.

If you want to check out any of my other social selling tips, visit LinkingIntoSales.com/alexa to listen to each tip or read the transcript. And for social selling training on-demand visit SocialSelling.Training.

This is Greg Hyer. Let’s Start Linking into Sales!