2026 Rankings
Social selling isn't about spamming DMs — it's about building relationships through content and engaging at the right moment. These 7 tools help you do that systematically.
Social selling on LinkedIn means building relationships with buyers before you pitch them: posting useful content, engaging with theirs, and reaching out when there is a reason to. The tools in this list support different parts of that loop.
Sales Navigator is the default for finding and tracking accounts. Analytics tools show what content lands. Engagement and outreach tools turn attention into conversations. The gap most teams feel is between those steps, where a prospect engages with a post and nobody notices in time to follow up.
| # | Tool | Best for | Starting price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ghost | Sales teams that want a complete social selling system, not just a tool | $99 / £79 / €89 per month |
| 2 | LinkedIn Sales Navigator | Enterprise sales teams needing advanced LinkedIn search and InMail | From $99.99/month (Core); Team and Enterprise tiers available |
| 3 | Shield | Individuals and teams who want deep analytics on their LinkedIn performance | From $25/month |
| 4 | Taplio | Individual sellers building their personal brand through content | From $49/month |
| 5 | Heyreach | Agencies managing social selling for multiple clients | From $79/month per sender |
| 6 | Closely | Small sales teams starting with multi-channel social selling | From $59/month |
| 7 | Aware | Account-based social sellers who prioritise relationship-building over volume | From $33/month |
Prices are the vendors' published starting prices and can change. Check the vendor's site before you buy.
Ghost treats social selling as a full-funnel motion: create content that resonates with your ICP, track who engages, score their intent, and reach out when they're warm. It's the only tool that unifies the entire social selling workflow in a single platform.
Best for: Sales teams that want a complete social selling system, not just a tool
Sales Navigator is LinkedIn's own premium sales tool, offering advanced search filters, lead recommendations, and InMail credits. It's the native way to find and track prospects on LinkedIn, though it lacks content creation and automation features.
Best for: Enterprise sales teams needing advanced LinkedIn search and InMail
Shield provides deep LinkedIn analytics for personal profiles, tracking post performance, follower growth, and engagement trends over time. It's a pure analytics play — it doesn't create content or automate outreach, but it tells you exactly what's working.
Best for: Individuals and teams who want deep analytics on their LinkedIn performance
Taplio supports social selling through content scheduling, AI-powered post creation, and a basic CRM for tracking LinkedIn connections. It's focused on the content side of social selling rather than the outbound or intent-tracking side.
Best for: Individual sellers building their personal brand through content
Ghost vs Tapliocomparison →Heyreach is a LinkedIn outreach tool built for agencies and teams running social selling campaigns at scale. It supports multiple LinkedIn accounts, offers unified reporting, and rotates sender accounts to increase daily outreach capacity safely.
Best for: Agencies managing social selling for multiple clients
Closely combines LinkedIn outreach automation with email enrichment, letting sellers find prospects on LinkedIn and reach them across channels. It includes a built-in prospect database and contact finder.
Best for: Small sales teams starting with multi-channel social selling
Aware (formerly Leadbirds) focuses on LinkedIn engagement management — helping social sellers systematically engage with their target accounts' content before reaching out. It tracks when prospects post and prompts you to engage, building familiarity before outreach.
Best for: Account-based social sellers who prioritise relationship-building over volume
You need a way to save target accounts and people and see when they change jobs, post, or engage with you. Check whether the tool alerts you or whether you have to go and look.
Social selling only works if your posts reach the people you sell to. Look for analytics that break engagement down by audience, not just total reactions.
The best moment to message someone is shortly after they engage with you. Tools that surface those people and let you start a personalised conversation, or queue one, close the loop.
If your team already lives in a CRM, check how notes, replies and deals get there. Copying conversations by hand is where social selling programmes quietly stop.
Every tool is judged on the same criteria: how well it does the core social selling job for a B2B go-to-market team, how much of the workflow it covers without add-ons, pricing, and how it handles LinkedIn account safety.
Ghost is our own product, so we list it first. Every other tool is ranked on its merits, and where we have a full side-by-side comparison we link to it so you can check the detail yourself.
The Social Selling Index (SSI) is a score LinkedIn shows Sales Navigator users across four areas: professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights and building relationships. It is a useful habit tracker but not a sales outcome, so judge tools by meetings booked rather than SSI.
Sales Navigator is strong for search, saved lists and account alerts. It does not write content, analyse which posts reach your buyers or automate follow-up, which is why most teams pair it with at least one other tool.
Expect weeks rather than days. Posting consistently and engaging with prospects builds familiarity, so the first outreach lands warmer. Signal-based follow-up shortens the wait because you contact people right after they show interest.