leads social media

How To Generate Leads From Social Media

According to Buffer, almost 75% of marketers believe that their social media marketing efforts have been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their business.

Hubspot spoke about this back in 2013. They found that they were able to more than double their success in generating marketing leads through inbound marketing – including social – than with all the conferences, trade shows, floor displays, real-life advertising, and even PPC.

According to Digital Eagles, social media advertising can bring about a 400% increase in sales:

But I am probably preaching to the choir here; we all know the power of social media. So how can you improve your own leads? It is much simpler than you might be fearing. All it takes are a few new aspects to be added to your already running campaign.

Define Your Sales Traffic

Prior to trying to generate more clicks, make sure you know what those people are supposed to do on your site.

These include setting up your calls-to-action, forms and cross-selling tactics.

Business management apps like vcita can help you manage all aspects of your sales funnel, from lead capture to nurture message sequences to appointment booking to customer management to payments. By allowing you to add non-intrusive fly-in CTA widgets with to your blog post pages, vcita makes it easy to turn social media content sharing into a viable and scalable funnel entry point.

vcita

Here are more lead generation hacks for ecommerce for you to get inspired!

Find Solid Outreach Tools

Being able to reach out to and manage relationships with your prospects is crucial!

SmartReach is an all-in-one email outreach platform for sales teams. It automates the process of cold email marketing and is designed to increase productivity and sales conversions.

smartreach

Research Your Customers’ Buying Journey

What brings your customers to a decision they need to buy a particular product?

Knowing an answer to this question will help you create a better informed social media marketing strategy.

Text Optimizer is a cool tool that helps you understand your niche by clustering it into underlying concepts and entities. The tool helps you identify all kinds of buying journeys to optimize for:

Incentivize Both Clicks and Engagement

Believe it or not, you don’t just want one or the other. Clicks drive traffic which take leads and turn them into conversions. Engagement generates further visibility, which bring in more leads. The two cycle into one another, and so failing to corner both will leave you with an uneven marketing structure that helps no one.

You should be incentivizing both clicks and engagement in equal measure on your social profiles. There are plenty ways to do it, but some of my personal favorites that have been shown to give great results are:

  1. Hashtag campaigns that encourage people to share their experiences, anecdotes, or even jokes and puns. Local hashtags are working best when it comes to awareness. Research local events, charities and small businesses and use hashtags to attract their listeners. Use local directories to find those: DirJournal, Yelp and others.
  2. Contests that ask people for user generated content, such as photos that can be retweeted/reposted/reblogged and double down as effective visual content;
  3. Curate social proof! Great customer reviews help build trust and improve your rankings too!
  4. Treat your Twitter following as your leads: Use a solid, mobile-friendly CRM software to keep track on your Twitter interactions and build your relationships further
  5. Create and optimize videos! Video content helps conversions and lead generation. If you also optimize videos on Youtube, you can build a powerful asset for brand discovery and recognition.
  6. Setting up a voting website and engaging your customers into creating their own wishlist will give you lots of insight into what your audience needs and likes
  7. Just asking! Calls-to-action can be a simple and powerful way to get people to comment, re-share, and click all in one post. If you don’t ask, don’t be surprised if they don’t respond.
  8. Give special offers for followers who share content. Have you ever seen those “Pay with a like or tweet” ebooks and webinars on blogs? These are fantastic, and you can do it with other things as well (giving points on services, discount codes, etc).

Keep an eye on how your social media traffic is engaging with your website. Finteza can help you understand your conversion funnel and whether it works well for your social media traffic:

Finteza

Take Advantage Of Paid Advertising On Social Platforms

Social advertising is some of the most effective social marketing available, and for a very reasonable price. Add in the ability to better customize those campaigns, and it is no wonder it has become so popular.

But don’t underestimate other platforms and their advertising. Twitter is a bigger investment, but it is more open and public. Instagram and Pinterest are still newcomers, but it means you have less of a crowd to fight through with your featured content.

Paid ads are a must on social networks. So narrow down your focus and put your money where your mouth is.

Further reading: A Brief Guide to Facebook Ads

Hold Tweetchats To Connect With The Industry

Tweetchats

Tweetchats are effective for generating both the clicks and engagement. Anyone who has watched the insane engagement gained through these live Twitter chats knows they have some serious force behind them. By hyping up and then having a conversation, you will gain followers, visibility, and (yes) leads.

Try getting some interesting guests or using some timely and trending topics to reel people in. Give them plenty of notice, and consider starting a bi-weekly, monthly, or even weekly chat. By making it consistent you can potentially create a list of regular leads that bear fruit.

Paper.li tip: Use Paper.li to archive your Twitter chats and build a third-party brand asset at the same time! That’s what we are doing to further promote our #VCBuzz chat

Aim For Authority, Not Popularity

A couple of weeks ago one of my Twitter accounts (a personal, quiet one) was added by a celebrity – which is fine, I see no reason why a celebrity couldn’t add my sleepy, barely updated personal account. But I couldn’t help but wonder: why?

Taking a look at his profile gave me my answer when I saw his high number of follow backs. He was using a well-known tactic of casting a wide net and pulling in as many return follows as possible. His name carries recognition and so people are happy to hit that follow button.

My issue with this kind of thing is that it is technically fruitful, but not actively so. You are getting followers who will probably never bother to respond to anything you say, retweet you, or go to your side. These are not leads any more than they are valuable social likes.

You should not be aiming for popularity if you want social lead generation. You should be aiming for authority, and showing people that you are one. Be more selective, and your efforts will probably bear more results than if you randomly add people to your list.

Here is some helpful further reading from our blog:

Do you have a tip for generating leads on social media? We would love to hear it, so comment below

Image by LuAnn Hunt from Pixabay

Ann Smarty
Ann Smarty is the brand and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, founder of MyBlogU.com and manager at ViralContentBee. You can learn more about Ann here.

One thought on “How To Generate Leads From Social Media”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.