Wondering how you can achieve these results and turn your social interactions into tangible revenue? This guide covers tactics, tools, and best practices for sales teams to identify the right prospects, build meaningful relationships, and generate leads on social media.
Table of Contents
- What is social selling?
- How to Build a Social Selling Strategy
- Working Social Selling Into Your Day
- Social Selling Best Practices
- Measuring Social Selling Success
- Social Selling Tools
- Frequently Asked Questions About Social Selling
- Getting Started With Social Selling
What is social selling?
Social selling is a sales strategy that uses social media to help salespeople find, connect with, and build relationships with potential buyers. Rather than relying on cold outreach alone, salespeople following this approach use social networks to research prospects, share relevant insights, engage in conversations, and build credibility throughout the buyer’s journey.
According to HubSpot’s Sales Strategy Report, 45% of sales leaders rate social media “very effective” at driving sales, a number higher than in-person meetings (44%) or video calls (35%).
Social Selling vs. Social Media Marketing
Social selling is often confused with social media marketing. A social selling strategy uses social platforms to build credibility and relationships before a direct sales ask. With social selling, sellers focus on individual buyer relationships and conversations. Social media marketing, by contrast, focuses on building brand awareness and engaging a broader audience through content and campaigns across social platforms. Marketing supports content and brand governance. Here’s an example of each.
- Social selling: A sales rep notices that a prospect has posted on LinkedIn about struggling with lead generation. The rep comments with a useful suggestion, follows their posts, and later sends a personalized message about how their product could help.
- Social media marketing: The company publishes a LinkedIn post about “5 Ways to Improve Lead Generation” to educate and engage its broader audience, without targeting or starting a one-to-one conversation with a specific buyer.
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How to Build a Social Selling Strategy
Building a well-rounded social selling strategy comes down to five steps: defining your audience, goals, and channels; optimizing your profiles to build credibility; listening and researching to spot opportunities; sharing and engaging in ways that move conversations forward; and tracking outcomes so you can keep improving.
1. Define the audience, goals, and channels.
A B2B social selling strategy starts with defined buyers, credible profiles, relevant content, consistent engagement, and a measured follow-up mechanism. Start by defining who you want to reach, what you want to achieve, and which social channels your buyers use. This keeps efforts focused and helps measure whether social selling contributes to pipeline and revenue.
- Identify the target buyers. Define the buyer personas, industries, roles, and pain points that social selling efforts aim to reach.
- Set measurable goals. Choose success metrics such as qualified leads, meetings booked, pipeline generated, or deals influenced.
- Select the right channels. Prioritize platforms where target buyers are active and where the sales team can engage them authentically. Don’t rely on assumptions about where they spend time.
- Study current data and your own engagement results. Determine which channels deserve the sales team’s attention. Based on that, revisit the channel mix regularly as buyer behavior and platform usage change.
Pro tip: Keep prospecting focused on professional networks and public professional profiles. Avoid using personal accounts or private social activity to identify or research prospects. In my experience, LinkedIn has been a strong starting point for B2B social selling since it’s built for professional networking and business conversations.
2. Optimize profiles and establish credibility.
A social selling strategy can stall if a profile looks outdated, generic, or overly polished. When a prospect lands on a profile, they must quickly understand who the sales rep can help, how the rep can help them, and why they should trust the rep. To optimize social profiles for social selling:
- Use a current, professional photo. Choose a clear, high-resolution image that is approachable and easy to recognize.
- Lead with the buyer, not a job title. Write a LinkedIn headline or X bio that explains who you help and how you help them. Add a relevant insight or point of view where space allows.
- Show personality. Use the About section to tell your story, explain what you know, and give prospects a sense of who you are beyond your role.
- Replace buzzwords with specifics. Highlight relevant expertise, accomplishments, and customer outcomes rather than relying on generic claims.
- Show how you help customers. In the experience section, emphasize the problems you solve and the business outcomes you enable, not just list quotas, responsibilities, or job duties.
- Share useful content. Post insights, visual content, and perspectives that are genuinely useful to your target buyers. The profile should demonstrate your expertise, not simply claim it.
- Build social proof. Ask satisfied customers and colleagues for LinkedIn recommendations that reinforce the expertise and the value you provide.
- Make relevant connections. Join communities and groups where your buyers spend time, follow relevant conversations, and engage thoughtfully with your network.
- Make profiles work together. Link to relevant professional profiles and, where appropriate, your company’s social presence. On X, you can also use relevant hashtags your buyers follow to make your profile easier to discover.
That said, don’t treat a profile as a digital resume and try to make it look perfect. Use it to build credibility and show the authentic human behind your brand who’s worth connecting with.
Barbara Robinson, marketing manager at WeatherSolve Structures Inc., recommends this over over-polishing every interaction. In her words, authentic social selling is “honestly just about being real and showing the human side of your brand.”
3. Listen, research, and identify opportunities.
Use social listening to identify relevant prospects, understand their needs, and spot timely opportunities to engage. Before reaching out, monitor what prospects, customers, companies, and industry communities are saying about your company and use what you learn to build connections instead of pitching immediately. Leverage social listening and research to:
- Identify buying signals and trigger events. Set up alerts for prospects and target accounts to monitor relevant issues, company news, leadership changes, new hires, expansions, funding, product launches, and other events that could prompt a conversation.
- Monitor conversations about your brand. Track what prospects and customers say about your company, including complaints and negative feedback. Responding to dissatisfaction early can help prevent a small issue from becoming a larger trust problem.
A great way to put this into practice is to implement HubSpot’s social media management software, which lets you create keyword monitoring streams that surface critical interactions and trigger email alerts when prospects mention key terms. This way, teams never miss a conversation about their brand. - Follow relevant industry conversations. Join communities, groups, and forums where your target buyers participate. Follow industry influencers and pay attention to the questions, challenges, and trends your prospects discuss, recommends Joe Zappa, founder and CEO of Sharp Pen Media.
- Research prospects before engaging. Review a prospect’s recent posts, professional interests, company updates, and relevant conversations to understand their priorities and personalize your outreach.
4. Share, engage, and move relevant conversations forward.
Share useful content, engage in relevant conversations, and move promising interactions toward a direct sales conversation. Remember, when engaging in social selling, the goal isn’t to broadcast promotional messages, but to build familiarity and trust by consistently contributing something useful.
“If you show up every day on social media here with intention and engage with people by liking or commenting on their posts, you are creating micro-moments of influence,” explains Alexander Low, managing director at DCM Insights.
To turn social activity into meaningful sales conversations:
- Share content that buyers care about. Prioritize useful insights, advice, and industry perspectives over repeatedly promoting your company’s products or content.
- Engage thoughtfully. Comment on prospects’ and customers’ posts in ways that add context, answer questions, or move the discussion forward. Avoid turning every interaction into a sales pitch.
Tools like HubSpot’s social media management software provide AI-powered engagement recommendations.
- Personalize connection requests. Add context on why you want to connect and reference a shared interest, a relevant conversation, or a professional connection.
- Ask for relevant referrals. When customers are satisfied with a product or service, ask whether they can introduce you to specific stakeholders or potential buyers.
- Recognize buying signals. When a social conversation indicates genuine interest or a relevant business need, consider moving the conversation to a more direct sales channel.
- Move conversations offline when appropriate. A call or meeting can provide the context and two-way discussion needed to explore a prospect’s needs more deeply.
Remember, the best social sellers don’t try to close in every interaction. They use social media to build relationships and create enough trust and relevance for a direct sales conversation to happen naturally.
5. Track outcomes and improve the program.
Measure social selling success through meetings, opportunities, influenced pipeline, and revenue — not engagement alone. Engagement metrics can show what resonates with your audience, while CRM and pipeline data reveal whether those interactions contribute to leads, opportunities, and customers. This reveals opportunities to improve results. Track the following metrics.
- Engagement: Monitor likes, comments, shares, and other interactions to identify the content and conversations that resonate with your target buyers.
- Leads and opportunities: Connect social activity to CRM data to determine whether social interactions contribute to new leads, sales opportunities, and customers. Marketing Hub, which includes social media management software, connects with Sales Hub, making it easy to power contextual conversations and track ROI.
- Pipeline impact: Where possible, measure pipeline generated or influenced by social selling activity rather than relying solely on engagement metrics.
- Social selling effectiveness: Refer to tools such as LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI) to benchmark activities related to establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, and engaging with relevant insights.
Caleb John, director of sales and marketing at Exceed Plumbing and Air Con, has seen firsthand the impact of changing his approach by tracking outcomes. After posting 10 promotional offers in a single month, his audience’s engagement rate fell below 1%. When he switched to a mix of behind-the-scenes content, customer stories, and helpful home maintenance tips, engagement jumped to 12%.
“The takeaway is this: If a business looks like a non-stop ad, people will ignore it,” John says. “Businesses that treat social media like a chat with potential customers, instead of a billboard, are the ones winning.”
The lesson is simple: measure what drives meaningful engagement and business outcomes, then adjust your content and outreach accordingly. Social selling works best as an ongoing process of testing, learning, and refining, not a one-time campaign.
Working Social Selling Into Your Day
Building social selling into the workday can start with as little as 30 to 45 minutes of focused activity, covering all four types of engagement — sharing, liking, commenting, and connecting — without taking time away from core sales activities. You don’t need to stay active on LinkedIn and X all day; instead, batch tasks into one block or spread them throughout the workday.
While the exact social selling routine will vary by role and audience, here’s what a well-rounded 30-minute daily routine may look like.
- 10 minutes: Find and share one relevant article or resource, considering a mix of your company’s content and relevant third-party resources.
- 5 minutes: Respond to notifications and engage with people who interacted with your content. Prioritize responses that could lead to a meaningful conversation.
- 10 minutes: Search for active discussions and posts from prospects, customers, and people in your industry. Leave thoughtful comments on two or three relevant posts.
- 5 minutes: Send one or two personalized connection requests if you see a clear reason to start a relationship. Personalize the invitation when appropriate.
Remember: The goal isn’t to maximize social interactions, reach out to hundreds of prospects every day, or comment on every discussion. The goal is to consistently create a small number of relevant, meaningful touchpoints with the right buyers. Reaching out repeatedly to prospects who haven’t shown any interest can feel intrusive and make your outreach less relevant.
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Social Selling Best Practices
The best social selling practices focus on providing value, building relationships, personalizing interactions, and creating consistent touchpoints rather than repeatedly pitching products. These seven practices make a social selling strategy more relevant and effective.
1. Lead with relevance, not promotion.
Effective social selling starts with giving before getting, i .e., providing value before asking for a sale. Focus on building familiarity and trust through useful interactions. Share insights that address buyers’ interests, respond to relevant conversations, and use social listening to identify opportunities where you can genuinely help.
Amra Beganovich, co-founder of Amra and Elma, puts it best: “The biggest mistake in social selling today is treating social media like a storefront rather than a conversation.”
2. Share useful original and third-party content.
Share a mix of original insights and relevant third-party content to demonstrate expertise without making your social presence feel promotional. While original content can showcase your knowledge and point of view, curated articles, research, and insights from other experts can provide additional value to your buyers and help you start conversations around topics they already care about. Sales expert Jill Rowley refers to sharing third-party content as “OPC” — “other people’s content.”
As you share content, include social proof where it adds credibility. Sprinkling customer feedback, success stories, and LinkedIn recommendations will reinforce the value you provide.
Marlon De Assis-Fernandez, a principal sales manager at HubSpot, explains, “ If you do a great job solving for the customer, they’ll always be keen to provide feedback — and the more you solve for them, the more positive that feedback will be. It’s a great habit to get feedback after a sales process and even better to have that feedback displayed in the form of a LinkedIn recommendation.”
3. Participate in meaningful conversations.
Engage with prospects and industry professionals by adding something useful to the conversations they are already having. Comment thoughtfully on relevant posts, answer questions, share useful perspectives, and participate in industry discussions.
Avoid generic comments that simply praise a post or immediately steer the conversation toward a sale. Instead, look for opportunities to demonstrate expertise and build genuine connections. Additionally, monitor what buyers and customers say about your company. If someone raises a complaint or publicly expresses dissatisfaction, respond appropriately and alert the customer support team when necessary.
Alexander Low, UK Managing Director at DC Insights, explains that the idea is to “focus on the outcomes you want to achieve, turn engagement into connections, and then take conversations offline.”
4. Personalize interactions using professional context.
Personalize social selling interactions using information prospects have shared publicly in a professional context. Reference their role, company, recent post, industry, professional interests, or a relevant business challenge to make outreach more useful and specific.
But avoid forcing personalization just to mention someone’s name or company. The best personalization gives you a genuine reason to engage and shows that you understand the prospect’s context.
5. Coordinate social, email, and phone activity.
Treat social selling as part of your broader sales process, not as a standalone channel. Use social interactions to inform email and phone outreach, and use those channels to continue conversations that begin on social media.
For example, sales reps might engage with a prospect’s social post, follow up with a personalized email that references the conversation, and then use that shared context during a sales call. This will create a connected buyer experience instead of repeating the same pitch across every channel.
6. Know when to move the conversation off-platform.
Move a social selling conversation to email, phone, or a meeting when a prospect shows genuine interest or a relevant business need. Social media is often useful for starting and developing relationships, but direct conversations provide more space to understand a prospect’s situation and explore fit.
Dan Tyre, CEO and founder of Tyre Angel, recommends moving positive interactions with prospects who fit the ideal customer profile toward email and calls so the conversation can continue beyond social media.
Pro tip: Timing is key. Don’t ask for a meeting after every like or comment. Look for signals that the prospect wants to keep the conversation going.
7. Stay consistent without relying on rigid posting rules.
Consistency matters more than following an arbitrary social media posting schedule. Build a sustainable routine around sharing relevant content, responding to engagement, joining industry conversations, and connecting with the right people. The goal is to maintain a steady presence without spending excessive time on social media or overwhelming prospects with messages.
As Tyre puts it, “The key is to have three or four interactions within 10-12 days,” demonstrating professional persistence without overwhelming the prospect.
Pro tip: Rather than treating this as a fixed rule, use it as a guideline. Adjust your cadence based on the prospect, the relationship, and how they respond to your interactions.
Measuring Social Selling Success
Measurement is arguably the most challenging part of a social selling initiative because the effects aren’t linear. There’s no formula yet that correlates the number of content shares or likes with the number of deals closed. But this doesn’t mean reps can’t measure social selling at all.
The most useful approach is to track a mix of metrics across three areas: what you do, how people respond, and what it contributes to pipeline.
Activity Metrics
Activity metrics show how consistently you’re showing up on social media.
- Posts: How often you publish original content or share relevant content from others.
- Comments: How often you leave thoughtful comments on prospects’ and peers’ posts.
- Outreach: Connection requests and messages sent to target buyers.
- Participation: Involvement in relevant groups, forums, and discussions.
Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics show whether your activity is resonating with the right people.
- Relevant replies: Responses to your posts, comments, and messages from people who fit your target buyer profile.
- Target-account interactions: Likes, comments, shares, and profile views from people at the accounts you’re trying to reach.
Pipeline Metrics
Pipeline metrics connect social selling to business results. A company can add a “social” source of deal options to its CRM software to see how many customers are coming from social selling.
- Meetings: Calls or meetings booked with prospects who started as social conversations.
- Opportunities: Deals created from social interactions.
- Influenced pipeline: Open deals where social touchpoints played a role, even if social wasn’t the original source.
- Revenue: Closed-won revenue tied to deals sourced or influenced by social selling.
Sales leaders who’d like to conduct a study on how social selling translates into sales should first systematize the practice and train reps on social best practices. They can then measure what impact the new routine has on closed deals by comparing future results to historical numbers.
Social Selling Index
The Social Selling Index (SSI) is a platform-specific diagnostic: it measures how effective you are at establishing your professional brand and presence on LinkedIn only, so it won’t reflect your activity on other networks. Use it as a directional benchmark alongside the metrics above, not as a replacement for them.
You can view your score by following the link on LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index page. Your score gives insights into your effectiveness in establishing your personal brand, reaching the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships. Your effectiveness is scored out of 100.
Social Selling Tools
Deploying social selling tools can help sales teams find prospects, research accounts, share relevant content, engage with buyers, and measure the impact of social activity. The right tool choice depends on where your team needs the most support, from prospecting on LinkedIn to managing social content or turning employees into brand advocates.
1. HubSpot’s Social Media Management Software
HubSpot’s social media management tools bring publishing, social monitoring, engagement, and CRM data into one place. Teams can publish and schedule content, monitor conversations and keywords, respond to social interactions, and connect activity with individual contacts in your CRM. This makes it easier to turn social interactions into contextual conversations and track their impact on leads and customers.
Key Features
- Social media publishing and scheduling
- Social Inbox for monitoring and responding to interactions
- Keyword monitoring to identify relevant conversations
- AI-powered engagement recommendations
- CRM-connected social interactions
- Social media performance and ROI reporting
- Support for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, X, and YouTube
Best for: Marketing and sales teams that want to manage social engagement and connect it to CRM data. It’s particularly useful when social selling is part of a broader inbound or relationship-building strategy.
Pricing: HubSpot’s social media management tools are included in Marketing Hub. Marketing Hub has a free plan, while paid plans start at $7/month/seat for Starter. Social media management capabilities are available in Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise, which start at $800/month and $3,600/month, respectively.
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2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s dedicated prospecting platform. LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps sales teams find relevant decision-makers, research accounts, monitor prospects, and identify signals that can inform social selling conversations.
Key Features
- Advanced lead and account search
- Lead and account recommendations
- Saved lead and account alerts
- Buyer Intent signals
- InMail
- CRM integration with Advanced Plus
Best for: B2B sales teams that use LinkedIn to identify prospects, research accounts, and build relationships with potential buyers.
Pricing: Core starts at $89.99/month per license, while Advanced starts at $149.99/month per license. Advanced Plus is custom-priced.
3. Oktopost
Oktopost is a B2B social media management platform that combines social publishing, engagement, employee advocacy, social listening, and analytics. Oktopost also connects social activity with CRM and marketing automation data, helping teams understand its impact on leads and revenue.
Key Features
- Social publishing and scheduling
- Social Inbox
- Employee advocacy
- Social listening
- CRM and marketing automation integrations
- Lead and revenue tracking
- Social analytics
Best for: B2B marketing teams that want to manage social selling at scale and measure its contribution to business outcomes.
Pricing: Contact Oktopost directly for custom pricing
4. Vidyard
Vidyard is a video selling platform that helps sales teams use personalized video to build relationships with prospects and keep conversations moving. Vidyard lets reps create one-to-one prospecting videos, share them through email or social channels, and use viewing data to identify engaged prospects and time their follow-ups.
Key Features
- Personalized video creation
- Video recording and hosting
- Viewer engagement analytics
- Calls to action
- Branded sharing pages
- CRM integrations on higher-tier plans
Best for: Sales teams that want to add a more personal, human touch to prospecting and follow-up. Vidyard is particularly useful when a personalized introduction, product walkthrough, or timely video follow-up can help a rep stand out and move a sales conversation forward.
Pricing: Vidyard has a free plan. Paid plans start at $59/user/month for Starter when billed annually. Teams and Enterprise plans offer additional capabilities and pricing options.
Frequently Asked Questions About Social Selling
Getting Started With Social Selling
Social selling works best when it becomes part of how your sales team builds relationships — not another channel for sending pitches. Start with the right audience, focus on conversations that create value, and use social insights to make your broader outreach more relevant.
You don’t need to overhaul your sales process overnight. Choose one or two platforms where your buyers are active, establish a consistent engagement routine, and track the conversations, leads, and opportunities that follow. Tools like HubSpot’s Social Inbox can help teams manage social interactions across channels, while Sales Hub’s Sales Sequences can incorporate social touches into broader outreach cadences.
The goal isn’t to be everywhere or post constantly. It’s to build credibility with the right people, create genuine opportunities to connect, and turn those relationships into meaningful sales conversations.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November 2014 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
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