Proven Tactics for Generating Leads with Social Media

While 65% of marketers have dedicated budgets for social media, most feel that their efforts are not having significant impact on the sales channel.

But, let’s face it: Social media is super popular, with as many as 23% of online consumers spending all their time on social media and on blog posts. Many more users feel they can trust businesses with a social media presence more than those that are not active across these social platforms.

When properly integrated into the marketing matrix, social media can be a great tool for generating qualified traffic for your business.

Focus your content strategy on the right channel

While there are numerous social media platforms available, you do not have to focus your efforts on all of them.

If your goal is to generate qualified traffic, it only makes sense to leverage those platforms where your target audience spends the most time.

Finding where your ideal leads hang out the most necessitates some research, but it will help you focus your content and lead generation strategy.

Whether most of your audience is on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Pinterest, spend time engaging with users in specific communities in your niche. Determine the kind of content they are looking for and share this with your community. The idea is to be helpful and not overly promotional.

Sharing helpful and timely content with the right people not only showcases your expertise but potential customers will start to look your way.

Control access to your content

To get people into the sales funnel, you need to collect solid information about them including their name, email address and other demographic variables such as age and occupation.

How do you do this with social media?

One way is to post teaser content on your social media page and include a clickable link to your site. Once users click through the link, they will be directed to a form that needs to be filled for them to access the rest of the content.

Gating content with a fill-up form is a great way to collect information and to establish a database of leads for the sales team. However, for this to work, it is important to keep the form user friendly by asking for just the most important information that will help you to directly contact your leads.

Grow Your Leads Base with Social Ads

Social ads have come a long way and the options available today make it so much easier for marketers to track and measure social media conversions.

For example, the new Twitter Lead Generation Card allows marketers to create promoted tweets and to upload an accompanying image. Users who are interested in the offer just need to click on it, and they are signed up immediately. Twitter uses the email address in users’ profiles and forwards this to the marketer.

Twitter’s approach is very helpful for marketers especially if you are targeting mobile users who do not want to fill out forms to access an offer. You can further compare the performance of each lead generation card and optimize accordingly based on the available cost-per-lead data.

Facebook also allows you to not only generate leads with social ads; you can also measure conversion metrics that allow you to calculate ROI values.

To get started with Facebook, create a Newsfeed ad. Accompany the ad with a link to an attractive landing page that features a fill-out form to access gated content. Add a conversion-tracking pixel in the thank you page that comes after users have filled out the form. The embedded pixel allows Facebook to track important metrics including cost per conversion and the value of each conversion

Social Media Leads

Being consistent and sharing valuable content at the right time are important in leveraging the audiences on social media. However, when it comes down to conversions, do not be sidetracked by vanity metrics such as likes, retweets, repins or the number of followers. What is more important is a strategy that brings actual prospects into the sales funnel; this usually starts by users filling out a form or signing up for an offer.