5 Strategies for B2B Social Selling on Facebook

By: Jock Breitwieser, SocialSellinator

May 29, 2019

Facebook is an ideal platform for social selling. With 2.3 billion users, Facebook is the third most visited website worldwide (Google and YouTube hold the top spots).

However, the way people use the platform requires employing some unique strategies for establishing connections and top-of-funnel interactions. Facebook is a personal platform first. You don’t want to send business communications intended for your customers, only to reach family and friends.

Here are some strategies for employing Facebook in your sales efforts:

Clean up your profile. Make sure that you adjust your privacy settings to keep prospects from seeing weekend party pictures, political opinions or anything else you wouldn’t want to share with a business associate.

Your Facebook posts should look like the content that you share on LinkedIn, only more personal. There is nothing wrong with letting your prospects get to see you. You don’t have to hide your wedding pictures or that photo with Grandma. Just make sure to give your profile an occasional once-over.

Join Facebook Groups. For B2B social selling on Facebook, Facebook Groups are your bread and butter. Groups are where your prospects will engage in conversations about their businesses, which makes them places you want to be as well.

The more Groups you join, the more likely you are to find Groups that filled with self-promoters posting links in a one-way feedback loop with zero engagement. Ignore these. Instead, look for groups with:

• Active discussions
• The right kind of discussions (i.e., the pain points your prospects are looking to solve)
• Competent moderators

Leverage Groups Discover. Visit the Facebook Groups Discover page and input search keywords specific to your business, mirroring the way a prospect would look for your business or product. The Discover page also offers additional resources including “Suggestions for You, “Popular Near You,” Groups that your friends are members of and listings for groups in categories like “Business,” “Art,” etc.

Create your own Facebook Group. Beyond joining an existing group, creating your own Facebook Group is an excellent way to increase your reach. As a moderator, you can nudge discussions toward topics that will position you to better sell. Start by launching a Facebook Group directly related to your products or area of expertise.

A couple words of caution:

• In a Group, you won’t be the only one speaking about the topic of your choice. If a prospect comes into this group, that prospect may find contributions of other members more meaningful than yours and become competitors’ clients rather than your own.
• While creating your own Facebook Group is easy, nurturing a group that stays alive, attracts members and engages them is hard work and requires ongoing commitment. With that long-term investment, however, a Facebook Group can grow organically and provide you with a reliable audience on the platform.

Slide into those DMs. As you begin to establish connections within Groups, you can start to migrate some discussions over to Facebook Messenger. Eventually, you may add a prospect as a friend on the platform and begin to interact with them on your news feed or throughout the Facebook ecosystem.

Many social sellers would say that while Facebook Groups provide them with a simple way to meet and connect with their target audience, Messenger is the most powerful tool on the platform. You can message anyone on Facebook that you are friends with directly. You can also message people that you are not friends with, provided that they accept your invite to chat.

Messenger is quickly becoming a digital marketing staple. As of 2018, only 31% of businesses on Facebook were using Messenger, but that number is quickly growing. Messenger alone has 1.3 billion active users that send more than 8 billion messages a day. This trend will likely continue as Facebook implements its consolidation of WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook messaging apps.

Connect with Jock on LinkedIn or via the SocialSellinator site.