Are my prospects and customers searching for insight on social media?, Tim Hughes

If you are not following Simon Kemp on LinkedIn you need to.

He creates these wonderful reports and data on social media, and it's all free.

Of course, we are social and Hootsuite pay for it, but for you, it's free.

You can get access to these reports and all of the back reports here.

The one I'm working from was created in July 2021, which you can access here.

Many people talk about search on social, but is it a thing?

Let's stop and think about how big social media is, we know it's big but is it really that big?

According to this report

Social media user numbers have jumped by more than 13 percent since this time last year, with the latest data showing an increase of more than half a billion users in just 12 months.
There are now 4.48 billion social media users around the world, which is equal to almost 57 percent of the world’s total population.

So it's big and as far as we need to understand is that pretty much everybody from a B2B buying team is on social media. And if maybe one person isn't on social, the buying team that makes the recommendation is all on social.

So what about search?

Social media dominates the world’s online activities

From this report

New data from GWI reveals that more than 95 percent of the world’s working-age internet users now use social networks and messaging services each month.

More than 5 in 6 internet users between the ages of 16 and 64 also visit search engines and web portals each month, but this figure is more than 10 percentage points lower than the figure for social networks.

In this report from April 2021, (so the quarter before the one above) Simon Kemp drills down into aspects of search on social as follows

Evolving search behaviours

We’ve been tracking the world’s evolving search behaviours for a few quarters now, and the latest data show that ever more people are going beyond conventional search engines to find information about brands.

GWI’s data suggests that more than 7 in 10 internet users now use or visit some form of social platform or tool when looking for information about the things they’re interested in buying, with almost 45 percent saying that they visit social networks like Facebook for this specific purpose.

The figure for brand research on social networks is even higher amongst younger age groups though, with nearly 54 percent of women aged 16 to 24 saying that they visit social networks when looking for information about products and services.

This drops to just below 30 percent for users over the age of 55, but that still represents a large and compelling opportunity for marketers.

It's clear from the number of people on social media that your prospects and customers are on social media.

Layer on top of that, the fact that people are now turning to social for insight, for education and for entertainment rather than search.

We can conclude that any company that is not empowering their employees to speak on social in their own voice and to join the conversations and even to start conversations are leaving money on the table.

So who's social selling?

In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.

But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling? Not according to Merrill Lynch.

"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"

The CRO (chief revenue officer), Richard Eltham of Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about social selling. See here.

“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind”

Kevin Murray MacArtney Underwater Technology recently posted about his success with social selling here and wrote an article about the transformation that has happened in sales here.

who is the Head of Sales at

Here at DLA Ignite we don't do "hints and tips sessions" we don't want you to waste your money. Our social selling and influence methodology will provide your sales team with the stable platform for growth. It is also the only social selling program based on 70:20:10 change management principles which gives your business the mindset change and habit change they need in this digital world.

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