Your guide to social selling: Turning connections into customers

Key points

• Social selling isn’t about blasting cold DMs — it’s about optimizing your personal brand, creating valuable content, and showing up consistently to establish credibility.
• Listen to what your audience is talking about, join conversations authentically, and nurture connections until they’re warm enough to transition into private, sales-focused discussions.
• Leverage social listening, automation, and centralized analytics (like Emplifi) to spot buying signals, stay efficient, and prove the ROI of your social selling efforts.

Cold calling? Never heard of her. With so many ways to connect and cultivate genuine relationships on social media today, there’s no need to resort to awkward, low-converting cold calls in order to sell.

What is Social Selling?

Social selling is about building the relationships and developing the trust that organically drive sales, rather than relying on outdated techniques.

Especially in B2B sales, buyers are more informed than ever before. They want to engage with real people and proven experts who can answer their questions. They also likely have DMs flooded with cold pitches that rarely land.

In this guide, we’ll lay out the steps needed to master social selling and turn an engaged network into the ideal customer pool.

Which platforms are best for mastering social selling?

LinkedIn

The best platform for B2B social selling is LinkedIn, which generates 300% more B2B leads than other social platforms. According to LinkedIn, 80% of its 582 million monthly active users are business decision makers.

Paid elements like Sales Navigator, paired with LinkedIn’s recently rolled out AI tools, can help generate targeted leads by researching accounts, advising on personalized outreach, and identifying buying signals. But there are plenty of ways to use LinkedIn for social selling even without Sales Navigator.

X (formerly Twitter)

Having a presence on X can be useful for monitoring industry trends, chiming in with relevant perspectives, and real-time engagement with your audience. It’s best for building credibility and a following, but not always for direct selling, since users can be anonymous or use pseudonyms. However, relationship-building can happen on X over time, building trust that can lead to sales in the long term.

Other platforms

Facebook groups, Reddit threads, Discord communities, and industry-specific forums can be great for chatting with community members and understanding customer concerns. It’s important to be mindful of each community’s culture and guidelines; if you’re perceived as just there to sell, you’ll be swiftly ousted. Instead, think about adding value and entering conversations with curiosity and respect. Keep relationships at the center of your social selling strategy and these forums can be a gold mine.

How to build your brand as the foundation for social selling

Before you reach out to anyone, you need to establish your brand on your chosen platform. There are several elements that all work together to create your brand.

Optimize your profile

Here’s a checklist for optimizing your personal profile on LinkedIn. (You will be using this, and not your company account, for social selling.)

• Profile photo: A clear, high-resolution profile photo showing your face. It should be 400 x 400 pixels, with a 1:1 aspect ratio. Professional photos that show a touch of personality, such as a smile, work best.
• Banner: A customized banner that adds more context to your profile. It can feature clients or companies you’ve worked for, a tagline that summarizes your value proposition, or any visual representations of your work. Use a platform like Canva or Adobe Express to design one based on templates. It should be 1584 x 396 pixels with a 4:1 aspect ratio. Be sure to check how it looks on both desktop and mobile.
• Headline: A straightforward, memorable headline that speaks to your purpose on the platform. For example, rather than “Sales at Ketchup Factory,” try something like “Sales leader helping restaurant suppliers find the right condiments.”
• Link: Featured link with a compelling CTA that directs prospects to the next step towards a sale.
• About: About section written in first person, highlighting your value proposition and top accomplishments, tied to the mission of the product or service you are selling.
• Featured: Featured posts showcasing some of your top-performing posts. Choose a mix of post types and feature visuals if possible.

Create a content strategy

Start your social selling content strategy by listing the content pillars or topics you want to cover. For example, your content pillars could be sales leadership, innovation in your industry, and promoting diversity in hiring. Having these topics at hand doesn’t mean that you can’t stray from them, but they can help you when you’re feeling stuck and let you build recognition.

Here are some tips for posting:

• Use an 80/20 mix of posting valuable content vs. promotional content. Build trust and authority by sharing your insight and expertise without asking for anything in return.
• If you want to amplify someone else’s post, the best way is to add a thoughtful comment. If you want to add your own perspective beyond a few lines, write a new post and tag the original creator. This gets much better reach than using the “Repost” feature.
• When it makes sense, include images with your post. Photos of people perform best.
• Pay attention to your hook (the first 1-2 sentences) because that’s what people will see first in their feed.
• Experiment with different post formats. For example, post a poll, then write a post sharing the results and your thoughts about them when it’s done.
• Post when your audience is most active. Weekday mornings in the time zones where your buyers live can be optimal, but post at different times to see what works best for you.
• Not every post has to be super serious or strictly business focused. Work-and-business-appropriate jokes, sharing something about your day (desk selfies and pet photos are always fun), or connecting a personal moment to your wider business pillars are all ways to connect with your network. They show you are a human who wants relationships, not just cold sales.
• If you’re not sure about whether to share something, ask yourself if you’d be comfortable saying it out loud to your boss. If not, don’t post it.

Remember that building a brand and network is more important than the performance of any single post. Don’t be afraid to try new things and figure out how your content fits into the wider network in your industry.

How to find ideas for posts

One of the best ways to get inspired is to read and comment on other people’s posts. If your comment gets a lot of impressions and replies, that’s a great signal to flesh out the idea into your own post.

Look at past content you’ve created: sales collateral, op-eds, blogs, presentations, podcast interviews, etc. Turn them into LinkedIn posts or a series of posts on X.

You can also use ChatGPT, Claude, or a social media AI tool of choice to help you figure out ideas. Try this prompt:

“I’m an expert in [topic] and I want to write a LinkedIn post about [recent news/idea] sharing my unique perspective. Here’s my take: [write out or include a voice note of your raw thoughts]. Can you suggest 2-3 different posts derived from this?”

Then, be sure to edit the results thoroughly so that they sound like your voice, not AI. People can spot copy/paste AI posts from a mile away, and they won’t help you build the trust and authenticity you need for social selling.

Mastering engagement for social selling

The way you grow your personal brand and approach engagement will depend on the audience you’re trying to reach. Are you mainly speaking to industry peers? To people in certain types of companies, or people with certain titles? Build your network according to your goals and ICP.

Grow connections

On LinkedIn, you have the option to Follow or Connect with someone.

• Follow: You will see their posts in your feed. Doesn’t require the person’s approval.
• Connect: Requires the person’s acceptance and allows you to see their full profile, view mutual connections, and DM.

When sending connection requests, don’t feel pressured to include a note if you don’t have something specific to share. Recent data points to higher acceptance rates for blank connection requests, since people can be wary of notes that feel like they may lead directly to a sales pitch (“pitchslapping”).

Try this sequence to connect organically and create warm leads:

1. Use the search function to find people in your ICP.
2. Comment on one of their posts.
3. Hit the Follow button to be sure you see their future posts. You can also get notified of their posts by clicking on the bell icon in their profile.
4. Engage with their content by reacting and commenting.
5. Send a connection request once you’ve developed a rapport.
6. Continue to engage with their content.
7. Send a DM to continue a conversation or share something they might find interesting.
8. Ask questions that help you better understand their pain points and whether your product or service might be a fit.

This creates genuine connections that can generate warm leads and even inbound requests.

Use social listening to find ideal content topics and connections

In addition to your content pillars, you can look to conversations your ideal customers and communities are already having to increase your social selling prowess.

Social media listening tools actively monitor conversations about your industry, competitors, and target keywords. This intelligence reveals buying signals before your competition even knows they exist and can help you tailor your content and outreach to topics that customers truly care about.

When someone posts about struggling with a problem your product solves, that’s an opportunity to engage and create a warm lead. Social listening also tracks competitor mentions, giving you opportunities to engage with dissatisfied customers of rival brands. At scale, this creates a pipeline of qualified prospects who’ve already indicated interest or pain points.

Deploy automation for efficiency

Smart automation eliminates the manual work that bogs down social selling efforts. Social media management platforms let you schedule content across multiple platforms, ensuring consistent visibility without constant hands-on posting.

Automation goes beyond scheduling – a unified social inbox consolidates messages and comments from all your platforms into one dashboard, so you never miss a potential lead or conversation.

This centralized approach means your sales team can respond quickly to prospects while maintaining the personal touch that makes social selling effective. Instead of juggling multiple apps and notifications, everything flows through one streamlined system.

Centralized analytics for measurable impact

The biggest challenge in social selling has always been proving ROI. How do you connect a LinkedIn comment to a closed deal six months later? Comprehensive social media analytics solve this by tracking the entire customer journey from first social interaction to final conversion.

A unified platform shows which content drives the most engagement, which team members generate the best leads, and how social activities translate to pipeline growth. This data transforms social selling from a “nice-to-have” activity into a measurable revenue driver that sales leadership can invest in with confidence.

The future is relational

The prevalence of social selling represents a fundamental shift toward relationship-driven revenue. While traditional sales tactics focus on interrupting prospects, social selling creates value first and builds trust over time.

The brands and salespeople who master this approach gain a competitive advantage. Every genuine connection, helpful piece of content, and thoughtful conversation becomes an asset that continues generating opportunities long after the initial interaction.

As buyers become increasingly skeptical of traditional sales outreach, the organizations that invest in genuine relationship-building will capture the market.

Are you ready to ramp up your social selling prowess with the best social listening and social media marketing tools for the job? Learn how Emplifi can help you up your game today.