Leveraging a social professional network like LinkedIn to drive your own B2B lead generation and sales is becoming increasingly important. Utilizing social selling for lead generation enables you to find and connect with your potential sales leads, who are already on those social platforms, engaging with others and their content.
Staying active on LinkedIn helps you engage and build trust with your target audience, keeping you at the top of their minds when they’re ready to purchase or work alongside you. Every day you need to be connecting and building relationships. Identify new prospects and find relevant ways to reach them. Make yourself discoverable!
Building Trust with LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn groups are a great way to build connections and lead generation. You’ll 
need to make sure you are joining groups where your target audience is. The goal is to find groups where members are actively debating topics and sharing perspectives and suggestions. It’s important to make sure you are sharing up to date articles and engaging with other posts by liking and commenting.
Once you select your groups, introduce yourself and show up consistently. Make this part of your daily to-do list and engage for at least 10-15 minutes. Do not focus on self-promotion entirely. Focus on giving as much value as possible, you will receive much more engagement this way which in turn builds up others trust in you.
Every few posts can be company related or self-promotion. Articles are great to use for content, but LinkedIn also likes when you simply just post a sentence or two asking a question without articles, without links, etc.
Building Trust Through LinkedIn Updates and Direct Messages
This also goes for your own LinkedIn account. Be sure to post 3-5 times a week to build relationships with your connections and engage with their posts as well. Once they build up their trust in you and reach out to you, if the sale or opportunity doesn’t happen right away, it’s very important to follow up.
Following up with a call to action message too soon may push your prospect away; instead, provide some type of valuable content to them as a little reminder that you haven’t forgotten about them. This could be an invitation to your group, a link to an article you recently published or came across, or a webinar you’re hosting. After a week or so, it’s time for that call to action message.
Building Trust with LinkedIn Native Video
Another great way to interact is through video! Create videos of yourself talking with prospects about relevant pain points. A video is very powerful on social media. Video gets people used to seeing your face, hearing your voice, and the more this happens, the quicker they will begin to build their trust in you and relate to you. Have your warmer audience, like your close friends, help share your content to their news feed and audience which will help you get the word out and become more known.
If you help others without expecting anything in return, this will help build trust quick! Share others posts, comment your input on their posts, message them to let them know you are here to help in any way that you can. People will remember and appreciate you and this will make them want to buy from you or work with you.
[cta] Are you looking for more social selling tips to help you get the most out of your LinkedIn activities? Join us for our FREE webinar on Wednesday, July 25th at 2 pm EST. Click here to learn more about Leveraging LinkedIn for Business Development and to register for the event. [/cta]
