Social media has continued to grow and evolve from being an optional channel for brands to often being the cornerstone of their social media marketing strategy.
The power of social media can influence and improve many areas of your marketing efforts, including lead generation.
Lead generation is a process that brings new leads or prospects to your business.
Using social media to help you in your lead generation strategy is a great way to connect to those who are already looking for your brand, follow similar keywords and hashtags, or are invested in important industry news.
In this article, we’ll look into what social media lead generation is and how it provides an optimal channel for your brand.
We’ll also present strategies to increase your social media lead generation results and review the best platforms for your company to focus on.
What is Social Media Lead Generation?
Leads are any person who has provided or in other ways given you and your brand useful information and expressed interest in your products or services.
The types of information you have on leads can include basic data like names and emails to much more complex data like addresses or employer details.
Leads aren’t customers yet — they are just prospects that have the potential to become a customer.
It’s important to find many leads so that you can fill your sales funnel and have fresh contacts to reach out to and convert into customers.
Social media lead generation is a strategic marketing strategy that captures qualified leads on your brand’s social media platforms and brings them into your sales funnel to then be converted into a customer.
Is Social Media an Optimal Channel for Lead Generation?
Social media is a great tool for lead generation and provides brands with highly qualified leads, or leads who are most likely going to convert to a customer.
Social media platforms in general have higher rates of engagement with users than other platforms like email or your website and landing pages.
It also has targeting and contact information built-in, since users all have their own profiles full of information.
Because you can search and find leads through social media rather than having them come to you through organic marketing, you can pick and choose who you get your message in front of, and find leads who are already engaged with your brand or industry.
Geo-targeting and location tools also help brands who have specific areas they want to do business in, and the filtering and analytics tools that are built into social media platforms further help you with your social media lead generation strategies.
How to Get Leads Through Social Media
Gaining leads through social media can happen in a number of ways.
Typically, brands follow several different approaches to improve their social media lead generation efforts, but there are a few simple ways to engage with your target audiences and gain new leads.
1. Optimize Your Profile
The first thing that potential leads will see on your page is your profile and profile information.
Optimizing this section will help create interest in potential leads and encourage them to follow or interact with your brand.
There are a few ways to improve your profile today, including:
- Having clear contact information.
- Using call-to-action buttons.
- Adding links to your website.
- Creating quick links to your newsletter or email sign-up pages.
- Perfecting your short brand descriptions.
- Picking the right image for your profile picture.
- Pinning important content to the top of your profile.
2. Use Links in Your Content
The content you create and share on social media needs to be compelling to encourage your viewers and potential leads to interact with your brand, but all that means nothing if there’s no clear next step.
Content needs to have a goal, and that is portrayed to your audience through clickable links in your posts.
Having links within your content helps guide your leads to the next step in your sales funnel along with giving your content purpose.
3. Create Social Media Paid Ads
Social media is quickly becoming the most popular venue for ad spending across industries.
Social media ads help you get your message and offers directly in front of the audience you want to target, not just anyone who happens to search for a term or look to the side of a website page.
Social ads help you reach your exact audience and increase engagement by selecting your group through demographics and other information that you know will have high conversions.
This helps you find the most qualified leads to add to your sales funnel.
4. Automate with Chat Tools
Customers and leads want to be able to get quick answers and engage directly with your brand at a moment’s notice.
Automation tools like chatbots can help you capture leads when they have questions about your brand, and they take the heavy lifting off the plates of internal teams.
After all, it’s much easier to set up a chatbot to ask leads for their personal information and find detailed information on their inquiries than have your team member sit and type out answers all day long.
5. Run Contests and Promotions
Contents and special promotions are a great way to increase your brand’s social media lead generation efforts.
These types of activities tend to have high rates of participation and engagement with audiences.
By having a prize or incentive to draw new leads in, you’ll find that more cold leads are willing to provide information or start interacting with your brand.
You can also increase follower counts or individual post engagement by having content rules like following your brand, retweeting or sharing posts, or liking your posts and pages.
6. Shares Stories and Testimonials
Word of mouth is one of the most powerful marketing tools, and one that your social media lead generation strategy can take advantage of.
When you use your platforms to share success stories and positive testimonials from your audiences, you build valuable brand trust.
Trustworthy and respected brands are much more likely to have positive engagement and increased interest from fresh audiences and their own customer base.
This gives your brand more opportunities to draw in fresh leads and increase your top-of-funnel numbers.
7. Take Advantage of Live Features
Going live or starting a live feed is a feature that brands are starting to take advantage of to improve their social performance and gain new leads.
You can go live to showcase new products, answer questions from your viewers, host an event like a webinar, or share exciting news.
Using live features helps build authenticity within your brand and shows audiences that there are real people and teams working behind the brand name.
It can create strong connections between your brand and your audience and attract interested leads.
8. Connect to E-commerce
Social media isn’t just powerful for lead generation.
One of the most valuable ways your brand can utilize social media platforms is through social selling.
Some brands find that most of their sales come from connections with e-commerce on their social sites.
When your brand is using e-commerce and social selling, you can get your exact products and services in front of a wider audience and in front of people searching for your exact solutions.
Even if they don’t purchase immediately, an e-commerce connection can help you gather valuable information to market to leads in the future.
Best Platforms for Social Media Lead Generation
While every platform can be used for social media lead generation, it’s important to identify which platforms and social channels are going to perform the best for your brand and your business goals.
The best platforms are going to be the ones that your customers use frequently.
Having strong buyer personas will help you understand where your ideal audiences spend their time on social media.
For example, if your audience spends most of their time on Facebook, then creating a TikTok social media lead generation strategy might not be the best approach.
Picking the platforms your ideal audience frequents ensures that your lead generation strategies are targeting the groups of people who are most likely to become customers and who are the most likely to be interested in or searching for your products and service solutions.
That way, you can ensure that your lead generation efforts are targeting the people who will respond the best.
Wrap Up
Social media lead generation is a fantastic strategy for brands who want to harness the power of their social platforms to increase their top-of-funnel numbers.
By capturing leads who are already interested in your brand, products, or service, you can increase the likelihood of conversions and improve your overall lead generation metrics.
The amount of strategies and approaches to take with social media lead generation means that every business can find a way to utilize their already existing social platforms to increase their lead count and bring in more revenue.
If you are interested in learning more about different ways to improve your social marketing and selling techniques, then check out our blog on social media strategy!
You’ll discover tips and tricks for improving your social strategies and learn why having a well-defined social strategy is essential to your brand’s success.
