The ultimate guide to social media outreach

Social media is all about connecting — you send friend requests, follow people, share ideas, and create partnerships. With such huge networking potential, you can’t help but wonder how you can leverage social media outreach to increase your sales and build your brand.

On paper, social media outreach seems simple enough: you roll up your sleeves and start reaching out to people from your industry. You’re bound to get some results with enough time and effort, right?

While that might be true, there are much easier ways to get great results by working smarter, not harder. These techniques include researching, segmenting your target audience, and preparing your outreach campaign long before you send out the first message, email, or connection request.

In this article, we aim to provide you with the perfect blueprint for social media outreach, starting from improving your online presence to sending out perfect outreach messages.

What Is Social Media Outreach, and Does It Work?

Social media outreach refers to the process of using a social media platform to cultivate client relationships, acquire new leads, and start new partnerships to sell your product or service.

Exactly how you do this, depends on the social media platform in question, but most people talk about LinkedIn as the perfect place to make new connections.

You can also reach out to people through other social media platforms to get their email addresses and then move to a more formal conversation via email.

Social media outreach often gets a bad rap — when people think about it, they usually imagine a spammy, poorly worded message about a topic that doesn’t interest them in the slightest. Sure, when you send generic bulk connection requests on LinkedIn to people who’ve never heard of you before, you won’t get a great response. But, this is spam, not outreach.

When done properly, social media outreach can get you great results and help you create meaningful relationships with new clients. Using LinkedIn for sales can, for example, help you book more demos if you know how to create a good outreach campaign.

So, let’s get into it and see what separates spammy, inefficient outreach efforts from a strong outreach strategy that achieves results.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO SOCIAL MEDIA OUTREACH

Step 1: Set Your Objectives

Kickstarting a robust social media outreach plan begins with pinpointing your business objectives and social media aspirations. You need a well-defined set of goals that aligns with your digital marketing strategy and business goals.

Are you looking to spark a dialogue around a new product or to nurture a community of brand advocates? Your journey begins by setting SMART — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound — goals for your social media outreach.

Your social media outreach plan determines who you’ll reach out to, how you compile your prospect list, and in effect guides your entire outreach strategy.

Step 2: Optimize Your Online Presence

Before you can even think about sending outreach messages, you must take care of your social media profiles.

A bad profile can undermine even the smartest outreach messages and fail to impress your target audience. Your profile is the first thing your prospects will see, so you need to make sure your prospects regard you as a trustworthy professional.

Here are a few things you need to do:

✔️ Profile photo

Use a clear, professional profile picture — regardless of the platform you’re using (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Your face should take up most of the photo, you should be dressed professionally, and ensure you’re smiling!

You can also use personalized images — more on that below!

✔️ Headline/Bio

All social media profiles must clearly and concisely display your expertise. Avoid buzzwords like “social media marketing wizard” and “spirited individual” — they’re overused and don’t say anything meaningful. Try to include some relevant keywords that illustrate your work in simple words.

✔️ Optimize your LinkedIn summary

This is specific to LinkedIn. The summary section gives you a great opportunity to tell users a little bit more about your previous experience and your best results thus far.

Use this field to share some of your most successful business accomplishments, and use keywords! They will help your profile come up when people search for services like yours on LinkedIn.

When you apply all these tips to your social media profiles, they will resemble something like this:

You want a good headline that tells exactly what your expertise is, a summary that starts strong and further elaborates on the headline, combined with professional LinkedIn profile and cover photos.

⚠️ Try not to get too absorbed by making the perfect social media profile. You’ll keep coming back to it on a regular basis, changing and adding things as you go along.

For now, completing the most crucial steps is important so you don’t lose any leads because of a poorly optimized social media page.

Step 3: Build an Image in the Industry

Once you’re content with all your social media profiles, it’s time to put them to use! The goal is to create genuine relationships and add new connections to your channels.

Stay active and engage in industry conversations to build an image in your industry. This will contribute to the overall quality of your profiles, as your profile visitors will see how knowledgeable you are about industry topics.

🔥 Post high-quality content and insights

As we are sure you know, everyone has an opinion. And so do you! To stand out from the crowd, you should post high-quality and relevant content like new insights, case studies, and research results from the industry; these are always good conversation starters.

You can preface each of those with your opinion on the topic to encourage engagement. Being authentic and having a well-thought-out perspective will not only increase engagement, but also your follower count.

🔥 Be active in groups and communities

Another easy way to get your name out there is by joining groups. LinkedIn and Facebook have thousands of groups that represent all kinds of industries in which professionals always discuss related topics.

For example, by simply entering “video editing” in the LinkedIn search bar and selecting “Groups”, we get more than 400 results with over 100,000 people.

Now, if you happen to sell an editing tool that can make life easier for video editing professionals, you can see how these groups are great places to start making connections.

So, join LinkedIn and Facebook groups to make yourself heard!

Step 4: Collect Quality Leads

Once you’ve set up the basics, that’s when the real work begins. The first part of the “real work” is to collect leads.

The key thing with collecting leads on social platforms is quality. You should focus on people who are likely to be interested in your offer, rather than employing a “paint by numbers” approach and trying to expand your list at all costs.

Get creative and search for people in your industry who are as close to your target audience persona as possible.

Below are a few ways to do this.

🔥 Target by interaction

Find a viral LinkedIn post from your industry and scrape everyone who has interacted with it. That way, you’re getting a solid list of people who follow news from your industry and are actively engaged in discussions.

For example, look at this post currently trending in “video games”:

This post attracted more than 260 comments, so if you want to target people interested in video games, this post would be a great start! You can use a tool like Phantombuster to extract all these contacts into a single list.

That’s a list of 261 quality leads right there!

🔥 Scrape groups

Remember the LinkedIn and Facebook groups we’ve mentioned? Not only are they useful as potential networking opportunities, but you can also scrape them and get the profiles of all their group members.

Note that some groups can have more than 10,000 members, so it may be a good idea to first scan their profiles and only target members worth connecting with. Some people in groups can be recruiters or students of the craft rather than people truly interested in what you have to offer.

🔥 LinkedIn advanced search

Finally, LinkedIn has advanced search filters that enable you to narrow down your results to a great extent. You can optimize your search by filtering for location, college history, previous and current employers, and job title, among other things.

Step 5: Personalize Your Outreach Strategy

Now it’s finally time to deal with those outreach messages. We will discuss two approaches to personalization in social media outreach.

🔥 Personalized messages

You can contact your leads via LinkedIn or email. Even if you found them on Facebook or Twitter, we don’t recommend getting in touch on these networks, as these networks are often regarded as social and not necessarily professional. Instead, you can use a tool like Hunter.io to get their email addresses from social platforms and then send them a well-designed, personalized email.

Personalizing your social media outreach campaign isn’t hard, but it takes time and effort on your part. You need to approach every lead on a micro level by thinking how you can get through to them. Grab their attention by keeping the answers to these questions in mind:

❓ What do you have in common?

❓ Where did you get their contact?

❓ What can you offer that’s valuable to them specifically?

Answering these key questions can help you craft a personalized message for each prospect. For instance, if you spot a fellow video editing enthusiast in a LinkedIn group, your message could be: “Hey Peter! We both love video editing — this tool made my life so much easier!” The aim is to identify and highlight a shared interest.

🔥 Personalized images

If you want to follow an even more advanced route and instantly grab their attention, you can include image personalization in your connection message.

With Hyperise, you can add atailormade image to your message and integrate it with the TexAu tool to send highly personalized messages to each of your prospects.

Once you’ve created such an image, this integration with TexAu will allow you to add your prospect’s name wherever you want it placed on the image. Whether or not they’re interested in your offer, this approach will surely get their attention.

Just look at the kind of responses we got:

You can also add other personalized text like their company name, job title, etc.

When you do personalization the right way, you can end up with a message that looks like this:

This message mentions the connection by name, mentions their industry in the first sentence, and boasts a personalized image. You can easily see how much different it looks from the average, spammy messages your leads may get on a daily basis.

We’ve found that personalized messages can increase your click-through rate by up to 14x. So, sign up for a free Hyperise trial and learn how to easily personalize each message to get better results!

Step 6: Analyze, Optimize, and Improve

Finally, one of the best tips when it comes to prospecting leads, is to keep tracking your results and see what works.

A great way to do this is by segmenting your leads. For example, you can go through your list of 500+ leads and highlight all the decision-makers. Group them and track the results for this group vs. other groups you’ve identified and set up, for example interns, 2nd LinkedIn connections, etc.

Depending on your product, you’ll find that some groups perform better than others. Focus your attention on those groups and don’t waste as much time on the ones that don’t perform as well.

As for how you can measure that performance, most prospecting tools offer elaborate analytics packages. These typically show you important stats like open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates — all of which are good indicators of your campaign’s success.

Social Media Outreach: Conclusion

As you can see, a social media outreach campaign starts before you start typing actual messages.

Think of it this way: you want to put yourself in a position where sending a message is almost a formality. You need to be confident in your lead lists and the research that led to them.

Then only can you start creating good messages. If you need any help to improve your outreach results and take personalization to the next level, try out Hyperise. With it, you can add a new dimension to your outreach strategy and experiment with different personalization methods.

Sign up for a free trial — it’s quick and easy!