We’re Just Getting Started! – A Look Back at Socedo in 2022

Confucius once said, “by three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest. Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is bitterest.” Suffice to say, we’re going with nobility, and a dash of experience. Thus, the time has come for our yearly reflection. As a startup, it’s exciting to say this is our first one! There have been a lot of breakthroughs and milestones this year, not just for us, but for the sales and marketing community as well. Because of this dual evolution, we’re thrilled to venture into 2022.  Here’s a look back on our accomplishments for 2022, and what you can expect out of us in the new year.

The Idea of Social Selling

Social selling has gained critical mass as a concept in 2022. In the last year we have seen whole conferences centered around the topic of social selling (like the AA-ISP conference). Great eBooks on social selling also surfaced, one’s like Killer Tips to Master Social Selling, From Social To Sale, and The Grande Guide to Social Selling. A year ago social selling was an unknown subject pushed forward by a handful of practitioners. Now a majority of sales and marketing leaders are thinking about how to leverage these new strategies and tactics within their organizations.

January – Techstars

In January we were thrilled to graduate from Techstars, an esteemed mentorship program for startups. Our experience was amazing, and our incredible mentors helped shape what Socedo now has become. Techstars launched us into thinking about social selling and how to develop tools that would help sellers and marketers. In actuality, it was the genesis of where we are now.  Seattle is really an amazing place for startups, and we want to thank the startup community here for being so supportive.

Winter – Discovery System

A lot of the work we did this year was around finalizing our discovery system. Most of us know that you can go on Twitter and search for a specific keyword, or set up a keyword stream on Hootsuite. The problem with this is that you’ll get Tweets from everyone and their mom who are posting using this keyword. What Socedo wanted to do, and did, was zero in on your perfect target customer who is using that specific keyword.

Example: You’re looking for Tweets about finance. Unfortunately, if you Twitter search ‘Finance’ or create a keyword stream on Hootsuite you’ll probably get a lot of students Tweeting about how hard their finance class is. Now, with Socedo, you can put in bio keywords into the criteria wizard (which we’ll discuss later). Thus, if your ideal target customer is a CFO or finance director, Socedo will find all of the CFO’s and finance directors who are Tweeting about finance and put them into your discover bucket.

While the discovery system is keyword-focused, it’s based around individuals, not necessarily Tweets. Our discovery system is able to pull in data and understand which prospective leads will be perfect for your query. Think of the discovery system as our engine working behind the scenes.

Spring – Reporting

Anything you’re doing around a lead generation is numbers-driven. You have a quote you’re trying to reach all the while determining the health of your pipeline. We understand that. That’s why we built that idea into our social selling strategy, and reporting is what helps you understand where those holes are in your pipeline.

Example: Socedo’s reporting would show you that if you’re approving only 10 out of 50 possible leads, that means that we need to revisit the criteria assistant (discussed below) to determine what specific keywords you’re looking for in your target client. Or perhaps your follow-back rate isn’t high enough. Then we would know that we should check out your Twitter profile to see if we can optimize your bio, picture, and types of Tweets to better appeal to your target persona’s interests.

Reporting exists to give you a sense of where your problems are, and where clients are getting stuck in your pipeline.

Summer – Criteria Assistant

Once we created our discovery engine, we needed a steering wheel and pedals. That’s our criteria assistant! Building a target persona for social media lead generation is new to many people. The Socedo criteria assistant makes it easy to come up with the keywords that will find your ideal potential customers. In addition, we wanted to give our users more control over who shows up in their Socedo dashboard. To do this, we released advanced controls like negative keywords along with and/or qualifiers. We also created the ability to require keyword groups.

Fall – Automation

We’ve been working on our automation process since the spring and recently launched this functionality to our premium customers! With this shift towards social selling, there’s a lot of adjustment that we, marketers and sellers, have to go through. Because of this, Socedo wanted to make the process as easy as possible by adding in concepts inspired from marketing automation.

We understand those feelings of awkwardness or misgivings about approaching someone over Twitter, and we didn’t want you to worry about sparking a conversation. Instead, we take care of that behind the scenes by engaging with prospective customers on Twitter on your behalf through a sequence of favoriting, following, and direct messaging. We want to make it easier for you to engage with more people in less time, so instead of spending your time on prospecting, you can instead dedicate your time focusing on more important aspects of the sales process.

The Future (2023)

Looking forward to 2023, this is what you can expect from us. We understand the importance and simplicity of syncing social networks into one base. Integrating with other social networks, including automation across social networks, is an integral part of Socedo’s first steps in the new year. We’re also working towards helping Socedo users use our tool while on the go. As always, we’re working to provide more in-depth analytics and giving you more control over the criteria, as well as providing syncing between CRM and other integration systems.

2022 has been an amazing year of breakthroughs and milestones, and we couldn’t be happier about what the future holds. Thank you all so much for your support, and happy holidays!