Effectively using search tools can gain you that coveted access to decision makers in your prospective accounts. Our partners at rFactr recently posted this blog on maximizing "boolean" search for social sales. It provides some great tips for those of you who want to gain an edge over your competition.
Each social network contains a highly detailed database of professionals that savvy salespeople can access to create targeted lists of prospects through social search. While that is great news for salespeople, search engines on social networks are also very robust. As such, it is important to familiarize yourself with social search best practices to ensure you are taking full advantage.
In general, when you are ready to perform your search (regardless of which network you are using) remember that the accuracy of your search results has a direct correlation with how specific your search is. That being said, Boolean search strings are one way to help manipulate your searches to ensure they return a list of targeted professionals.
As a bit of background, a Boolean search is a type of search that lets you to combine keywords with operators like AND, OR and NOT to limit, widen or further refine your search strings for more relevant results. Below is a basic guide to Boolean Operators and which ones are accepted by each social network:
As a best practice, it is recommended that you use the OR operator to widen searches to gain the maximum number of results that could be a match, and utilize the AND and NOT operators to refine your searches to ensure the results are relevant. However above all, when prospecting or participating in social listening, utilizing Boolean operators will allow you to create much more targeted search results than basic search alone.
(Editor's Note: This post was originally posted on rFactr's blog. rFactr's social sales program provides sales organizations with an easy way to activate their team on social channels, enabling them to connect with prospects and begin the sales process earlier in the sales cycle. Learn more... )
