Adam Houlahan: Use This Social Media Marketing Strategy to Grow Sales

Sep 22, 2014

Wes Schaeffer

The Sales Podcast Marketing Automation Digital Marketing

About Today's Guest on The Sales Podcast

Adam Houlahan proves that you can be "not that social" and still build a tremendous business leveraging social media.

Three years ago he had never seen Twitter or had a Facebook account. He was in B2B sales and didn't think he needed social media. When he started working with a company that was struggling with their retail program, he noticed in his research that his competitors had a good social media presence, so he dug in.

By approaching social media from a business angle he has experienced tremendous growth that is worth studying and emulating in any industry.

Rubber-Meets-The-Road Sales Tip

Google+ warrants your attention.
- A client of his was struggling with SEO and after three months on Google+ they rose to #1.
- Be on there regularly like HootSuite.
- Create your content and schedule it out a month in advance.
- Do not outsource the creation of your content. It’s hard to find good writers that can find your voice.

Do not outsource the creation of your content. Create your content and schedule it out a month in advance."

Create profiles with 10’s of thousands of followers in under an hour a day.
Trying to build too quickly is where entrepreneurs go wrong.
He gets 20 million impressions a month following this strategy.
LinkedIn is his #1 source of traffic to his program.
Social media is more about what you shouldn’t be doing.

Social media is more about what you shouldn’t be doing."

On LinkedIn people make several big mistakes:
1. You have boring profiles. (Your summary should be about the problems you solve.)
2. Treating LinkedIn like any other social media profile. Keep it all about business.
3. People post too much. Less is more nowadays. Posting 2-3 times a day on LinkedIn is fine.
4. Don’t interact with people unless you really know them.
5. When starting out you will be 100% sharing good content of others. As you grow you’ll shift towards more 50/50 of creating your own content and sharing that of others.
If you use humor, keep it clean.
Sharing inspirational quotes once a day or 3-4 times a week is sufficient.
Stay focused in a niche and build yourself up as an authority in that niche.

Stay focused in a niche and build yourself up as an authority in that niche."

One if his best giveaways is a free LinkedIn tutorial.

He doesn’t even ask for people to opt-in.
People think he’s crazy but he has found that everyone has two email addresses: the real one and the “research” email address.

Instagram depends on your niche.
Pinterest is a platform everyone should be on.
He gets about 25,000 visitors per month to his site and 30% comes from Pinterest.

Give away your best stuff up front for free."

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