On our quest for better social ROI (return on investment), our marketing team found a great infographic about the top 30 social sales influencers (you can find it here).
It identifies 30 of the most influential online social sales professionals from over 500 candidates.
So What’s the Problem?
Once I read the article I thought it would be great to follow them on Google Plus. I’m a huge fan of Google Plus (You can join our community of 70,000+ members here https://plus.google.com/communities/100620726524375035717) and I thought “Here are some people I can learn from!”
As I went down the list trying to add them to a new circle… I couldn’t find some of them at all on Google Plus. When I was able finally track them down, some of them have very low interaction rates. And some had multiple profiles?!?
This was baffling! How can the top 30 social sellers actually be in the top 30, but not have a decent presence on one of the largest social networks?
So I decided to do some research of my own using a great app called Rival IQ and find out where these social sellers are actually investing their time and resources. We included their company pages where applicable in the research.
Who is walking the walk and not just talking the talk?
We are sharing a summary of results with you in the infographic below. If you’re interested you can get the entire 167 page PDF report that has even more insights and information for each company across the social platforms. Just sign up to get our email updates and we’ll send you the report for free!
The results are from the 90 day period of June 17, 2014 to September 14, 2014. We analyzed information from their public profiles on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, YouTube, and Instagram. We also included a bonus SEO analysis at the end.
So let’s get to it!
Companies With Social Presences
Let’s start off with the overall social matrix. The first thing that becomes obvious very quickly is everyone has a presence on Twitter. That is followed by 26 of the 30 profiles studied have a presence on Facebook. The third thing of note only 6 of the top 30 have any presence on Instagram. This was an eye-opener.
Total Social Audience
The social audience number consists of the totals of all potential viewers of a post / update across each social network. This number includes likes, follows and plus ones depending on the network.
Maximize Your Social (http://maximizeyoursocial.com/) leads the way with a total social audience count of 99,721. This audience is followed closely by SalesGravy (http://www.salesgravy.com/) with 92,735 and Don Cooper (http://www.doncooper.com/) with 68,295. The top 8 are rounded out by Sales Benchmark Index (http://www.salesbenchmarkindex.com/) with 43,265, Heinz Marketing (http://www.heinzmarketing.com) with 43,155, The Sales Blog (http://thesalesblog.com/) with 40,847, Closing Bigger (http://closingbigger.net/) with 32,282 and rounded out with Fill the Funnel (http://www.fillthefunnel.com/) with 28,121.
Activity Level
Who posts the most? Sales for Life!
Going back 90 days (June 17 to Sept 14) the most active company was Sales For Life (http://www.salesforlife.com/). They have a total of 3,635 posts and updates in that timeframe. These posts are mostly Twitter (@mysales4life), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SalesForLife), and Google Plus (https://plus.google.com/+Salesforlife/posts). The Google Plus posting is an exception to the others in the top 14. The vast majority of activity from the other companies analyzed are Twitter interactions.
How Engaging Are They?
Engagements are retweets, likes, favorites, plus ones, and other indicators of response from their audience depending on the channel.
Maximize Your Social (http://maximizeyoursocial.com/) had almost 6 TIMES the engagement of their nearest competitor with 31,256 engagements. Interestingly the vast majority of their engagement (22,396 engagements) was from their Instagram followers (http://instagram.com/nealschaffer).
The Sales Blog (http://thesalesblog.com/) was the second most engaging company across all networks, with a split between their Twitter account (@iannarino) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/thesalesblog).
It should be noted again the vast majority of engagements across all networks are from Twitter.
Individual Social Network Summaries
Of the top 50 tweets, 62% were photos, 6% were status and 32% were link updates. The most popular day for top engagement is Thursday, with very little engagement on the weekends. The number of followers impacts everything in twitter. Maximize Your Social (@nealschaffer) leads the way with 94,174 followers, with SalesGravy (@salesgravy) close behind at 91,719 followers.
How Often Do They Tweet?
Maximize Your Social (@nealschaffer) is again the leader, with an average of 36.21 tweets per day. The top 11 Social Sales Influencers analyzed all tweet more than 10 times per day.
What Is The Engagement?
Maximize Your Social (@nealschaffer) has the greatest number of total interactions at 8,786 retweets and favorites. Heinz Marketing (@heinzmarketing) is the most engaging per individual tweet, irrelevant of follower count. With 6.39 engagements per tweet, they are more than twice as engaging as the second most engaging company Inside Sales (@InsideSales) with 2.81 engagements per tweet.
Twitter Takeaways:
#1 – Have a presence on Twitter – all the companies are engaged in some way on twitter, and the more frequent the tweets and engaging they are, the larger the audience.
#2 – When posting on Twitter, 62% of the top 50 tweets were photos, and the top 11 Social Sales Influencers analyzed all tweet more than 10 times per day. That’s something to note for your future posts.
#3 – Look at the content Heinz Marketing (@heinzmarketing) is posting. They are getting more than 6 interactions per tweet!
Of the top 50 posts, 58% were photos, 2% were status and 40% were link updates. The most popular day for engagement of the top 50 posts was Friday. The least popular day is Saturday, and all the other days of the week were about even. With the algorithm changes that Facebook has implemented, the number of followers impacts your reach and engagement. The Sales Blog (https://www.facebook.com/thesalesblog) company page leads the way with 4,357 likes. Inside Sales (https://www.facebook.com/InsideSalesdotcom) has 3,813 and Ace of Sales (https://www.facebook.com/aceofsales) is third with 2,888 followers.
How Often Do They Post?
Fill the Funnel (https://www.facebook.com/FilltheFunnel) is the most prolific poster. With an average of 12.08 posts per day they are really working this channel. Sales For Life (https://www.facebook.com/SalesForLife) follows with 7.99 posts per day and Heinz Marketing (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Heinz-Marketing-Inc/206245739402391) posts 3.12 times per day. Everyone else posts an average of less than once per day.
What Is The Engagement Rate?
The Sales Blog (https://www.facebook.com/thesalesblog) has the greatest number of total interactions at 1,926. The Sales Blog is also the most engaging per individual post, irrelevant of follower count. With 12.93 engagements per post they lead Maximize Your Social (https://www.facebook.com/nealschaffer) with 10.57 per post and SalesLoft (https://www.facebook.com/SalesLoft) with 8.32 interactions per post.
Facebook Takeaways:
#1 – Have a presence on Facebook – 26 of the 30 companies are engaged in some way on twitter, and the more engaged and engaging, the larger the audience.
#2 – When posting on Twitter, 58% of the top 50 posts were photos. That’s something to note for your future posts.
#3 – Look at the content The Sales Blog (https://www.facebook.com/thesalesblog) is posting on Facebook. They have the most engagement on this platform.
Due to platform restrictions the information is truncated on LinkedIn and only shows for the last 7 days.
It is difficult to identify trends, but Tuesday and Thursday had the highest engagement rates during the week reviewed. SalesGravy (http://www.linkedin.com/company/salesgravy.com) have the most followers with 3,463 followed closely by Inside Sales (http://www.linkedin.com/company/insidesales.com), Sales Benchmark Index (http://www.linkedin.com/company/sales-benchmark-index) and Heinz Marketing (http://www.linkedin.com/company/heinz-marketing-inc).
How Often Do They Update?
Sales For Life (http://www.linkedin.com/company/sales-for-life) has the most updates with 7.29 average updates per day. This update rate is almost 3 times Heinz Marketing’s (http://www.linkedin.com/company/heinz-marketing-inc) with 2.57 and is more than 3 times No More Cold Calling (http://www.linkedin.com/company/no-more-cold-calling) with 2.14 updates per day.
What Is The Engagement Rate?
Sales Benchmark Index (http://www.linkedin.com/company/sales-benchmark-index) has the greatest number of total interactions at 12 likes and comments on their company page. Inside Sales (http://www.linkedin.com/company/insidesales.com) is the most engaging per individual update. It should be noted that only 6 companies had any engagement at all and they lead the way with 2.67 engagements per update.
LinkedIn Takeaways:
#1 – Only 6 companies got any engagement at all. However the date range is significantly smaller than the rest of the analysis due to platform data access restrictions.
Google Plus, YouTube, & Instagram
We have grouped these last social channels together. This is because these channels are the focus of very few companies in the overall analysis.
This is very interesting and raises the question: “Why don’t they get more attention and resources allocated?”
Google Plus
Nimble (https://plus.google.com/+NimbleCRM/posts) leads the way with 3,805 plus ones. Sales for Life (https://plus.google.com/+Salesforlife/posts) leads the way with an average of 7.79 posts per day to the network, and A Sales Guy Consulting (https://plus.google.com/116995629227188621377/posts) has the highest total engagement with 111 plus ones, comments, and reshares.
YouTube
Inside Sales (http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZMEVlLm5XdRHl11rvO_GjQ) leads the way with 1,168 channel subscribers. Sales for Life (http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGdoQ6cjCJUSbfQoCxChRdQ) leads the way with an average of 0.37 posts per day to the network, and it is worth noting that a total of 6 companies total posted to the network at all in the last 90 days. Sales for Life (http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGdoQ6cjCJUSbfQoCxChRdQ) also has the highest total engagement with 43 likes, dislikes, and comments.
Maximize Your Social (http://instagram.com/nealschaffer) dominates this channel with 4,080 channel followers. Of the 6 companies with any presence at all Maximize Your Social leads the way with an average of 2.01 posts per day to the network. It’s also no surprise that Maximize Your Social has the highest total engagement with 22,396 likes and comments. It should be noted that the Instagram channel is a personal channel (http://instagram.com/nealschaffer) and personal posts about Southern California and Japan lead the way.
SEO
This is a quick bonus analysis that I wanted to include so you can get some insight into the websites of these leading companies. The vast majority of links and updates point back to their sites. Thus I wanted to check the health, relevance, and optimization of the sites in question.
Homepage Title
The average homepage title length is 53.7 characters long. This fits well as Google typically displays between 50-60 characters in a 512 pixel display. Best practice is to keep your titles under 55 characters long and it will show correctly in 95% of search results. Here’s a great tool to see how yours looks provided by Moz (http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag)
Homepage Meta Description
There is a great resource here (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en) from Google about how they generate titles and descriptions for your site that show in search engine results pages. The ideal length is between 130 and 160 characters, and uniqueness is key. While almost all of the companies have a unique description (several don’t have any at all) 13 of the descriptions are too short, and 6 are too long.
Meta Keywords
SEO LOGIC did such a good job of describing what these are and why they are important, I have copied part of their article here. You can read the rest here on their site: http://www.seologic.com/faq/meta-keywords
“Long ago in Internet time, the meta keywords tag was very useful in helping pages to win on search engines. Unfortunately, so many unscrupulous webmasters have abused the meta keywords tag that search engines have had to de-emphasize their importance. Still, you should not leave the meta keywords tag off your pages.
Meta keywords tags should adhere to the following guidelines: (1) keep your list of keywords or keyword phrases down to 10 – 15 unique words or phrases; (2) separate the words or phrases using a comma (you do not need to leave a space between words separated by commas); (3) do not repeat words or phrases; (4) put your most important word or phrases at the beginning of your list.”
Following this best practice above, 16 of the websites do not have any meta keywords at all, 6 would fall into the best practices above, and the remainder have included too many keywords.
Takeaways Summary:
This is just a glimpse into the world of online social sales influencers. When analyzing their engagement and presence we have to keep in mind who their target market is, and how they go about attracting new business. Taking that into account, here is what I’ve learned:
#1 – HAVE A PRESENCE ON TWITTER! – all the companies are engaged in some way on twitter, and the more engaged and engaging, the larger the audience.
#2 – Look at the content Heinz Marketing (@heinzmarketing) is posting on Twitter. They are getting more than 6 interactions per tweet.
#3 – On Twitter and Facebook more than half of the top 50 posts to both networks were photos, and the top 11 Social Sales Influencers analyzed all tweet more than 10 times per day.
#4 – Look at the content The Sales Blog (https://www.facebook.com/thesalesblog) is posting on Facebook. They have the most engagement on this platform.
#5 – Of the other social networks, only a few companies are even spending any time at all. This is interesting and could offer some insight into your own marketing efforts.
#6 – Make sure your site is following best practices for optimization. What is ‘best’ changes all the time, but very few of the sites analyzed have all the best practices implemented.
Conclusion
How you measure success varies greatly.
If the size really matters, then the size of your social audience is the key indicator of success. Maximize Your Social would be #1 using this indicator.
If social activity including volume of posts and updates is the key, then Sales For Life would be #1.
I would like to think that Social Engagement Volume is THE key indicator of success. Real people are interacting, and you’re not just posting and posting. If your audience responds, shares, likes and retweets your content, then to me that indicates relevance and success. After all, this is ‘Social Media’ we’re evaluating.
Using this as an indicator, I would like to narrow down the original list of 30, to my own top 10 Social Media Influencers (with website and twitter handles):
AOK Marketing’s Top 10 List of Social Sales Influencers
- Maximize Your Social – http://maximizeyoursocial.com/ – @nealschaffer
- The Sales Blog – http://thesalesblog.com/ – @iannarino
- Jill Rowley – http://www.jillrowley.com/ – @jill_rowley
- Heinz Marketing – http://www.heinzmarketing.com/ – @heinzmarketing
- Jill Konrath – http://www.jillkonrath.com/ – @jillkonrath
- Inside Sales – http://www.insidesales.com/ – @InsideSales
- Nimble – http://www.nimble.com/ – @Nimble
- SalesLoft – http://salesloft.com/ – @SalesLoft
- A Sales Guy Consulting – http://asalesguy.com/ – @keenan
- New Sales Coach – http://newsalescoach.com/ – @mike_weinberg
Now that I’ve chosen my top 10, it’s time to come full circle and answer the question: Where Do The Top 30 Social Sales Influencers Actually Spend Their Time?
The undeniable truth: Twitter.
About The Author
