Today’s digital space is being increasingly muddied by the daily barrage of new, and often poorly planned content. In fact, the amount of content that gets created online every 30 hours equivocates to the amount of content from the caveman era to 2008. That’s when the social media explosion happened and people began creating and sharing their own content en masse. Fast forward to today and we have and endless spattering of content we have to cut through to be effective.

This brings us to the concept of “likeability” – how much is a particular post or piece of content “likeable”? For B2B Salespeople, the content they share needs to be liked and valued by their prospects. The like-ability of the content can increase by crafting posts using best practices for each social network (length, language, media, etc). Good content, context and… good timing! This means not only knowing when the prospect exhibits the need for specific content – and the ability to deliver that content to the prospect at the optimal time for action via the right medium.

Salespeople are publishing content to drive thought leadership but the ultimate goal is to get expressions of interest and engage prospects into the sales process. With the amount of content we know that’s jamming the feeds how can we stand out and turn social content into dollars?

Likeability = Targeted Content + Situational Context + Timing

We agreed that the goal is to cut through the crap and build our pipeline. That means we only care about the attention of a very small subset of people – those that match out buyer persona. This requires having content that is optimized for social media and that is adding value specifically to your buyer persona. Content that is role based, industry based and funnel stage based is a great way to organize content you intend to share – and share it the right way. This may be by DM, or dangled in front of them in public areas like hashtags you know they are active in. Monitoring their online activities also give you windows of context to leverage – for example – when the prospect asks a question thats applicable, or shares an article that opens the door for you to share the right content.

“Likeability” of content for B2B Salespeople depends on:

  • Role/Industry/Funnel Stage Focused Content
  • Monitor & Search For Prospect Signals
  • Deliver @ Best Time & Best Channel