Every company has a few mantras that inspire their day-to-day work life. At SoAmpli, we tell ourselves constantly: ‘Ask the data. It has the answers’. During the last two years in business, we have observed a number of trends on the types of content salespeople love best for social selling. But we needed to dig deeper into the data to gain some useful knowledge and build on our intuitions.
So, what we did was to go back to our platform, look at over 7 million social posts uploaded to our platform and analyse what was shared by 60k salespeople active on SoAmpli.
Looking at the numbers a bit more closely, it didn’t take long to get few interesting findings. For example, we learnt that marketing teams active on our platform create on average 10 posts per week for their colleagues to share – that is 2 posts per weekday. At the same time, colleagues in sales share at least 15 posts per week on their multiple social media channels, resulting on thousands of tweets, LinkedIn updates and Facebook posts being sent from SoAmpli every day.
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%
Thought Leadership
- Downloadable reports and webinars – any lead generation web page asking people to provide their personal data in exchange for useful content – 14%
- Useful industry content – curated content from reputable sources about the industry the company operates in – 11%
- Topical content – social media content related to a trending topic (the biggest one in 2016? Pokémon Go!) – 6%
- Thought leadership positioning – articles by senior execs at the company showcasing their unique expertise – 3%
Company Culture
- Company life – photos or articles showcasing the company’s culture and office life – 10%
- Vacancies/HR – job openings the company is looking to fill – 7%
Now, it should not come as a surprise that campaign-related content is by far the most shared by people in sales, at 24%. This clearly depends on the high frequency with which these types of content are posted by the marketing team (on average, they represent one third of all content posted on company’s SoAmpli platforms). However, it is interesting to see how sales teams are happy to share these on an on-going basis to increase the reach and awareness of their company’s campaigns.
The second most-shared type of content is represented by downloadable reports and webinars (14%). This is great news for all the stakeholders involved, as it increases the perception of the company as expert in their field, while providing a way to capture warm leads that can be then shared back with the sales team. As they say, a win-win situation.
Informative blogposts from the company’s blog follow right after, at 12%, together with useful industry content, taken from reputable sources and curated by the marketing team, at 11%. The combination of these two types of content clearly shows that sales teams are learning quickly how to make the most of social media for sales. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are not places where you can push promotional content down your connections’ throats, asking them to BUY BUY BUY all the time, but platforms to showcase your expertise, establish yourself as someone ‘in the know’ and start conversations around shared interests to strengthen the relationship with prospects and clients.
Finally, creating positive associations for the company as an employer appears to be another shared objective by marketing and sales, and one we suspect the HR department won’t be too disappointed in either. Posts showcasing the company’s culture and life perform consistently well, representing 10% of all top shared posts.
Want to know more about what our analysis of 7M+ social selling posts revealed?
Download our complete white paper.
