Social media is much more than just a way to grow your brand and connect with your current customers. When done correctly, you can actually use platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram to generate real leads for your business!
Generating Leads With Facebook
The changes to Facebook’s algorithm have made it increasingly difficult to get organic reach and as a result, generating a significant number of leads through Facebook is usually going to mean running paid ads. Aside from using Ads, there are some tactics you can use to try and turn existing fans into leads.
Contests
Contests are renowned for being highly successful on Facebook and drawing lot of attention. The only negative of this attention is the leads you get are not always the most qualified because you will have a lot of freebie seekers. But nonetheless, you should still use contests on your page as it is a good way to gather emails. Consider a tool like Shortstack to help you setup Facebook contests and collect your leads because it integrates with most major email marketing tools like MailChimp.
Create a Custom Tab
Facebook lets you setup custom tabs on your Page, making it a great spot for contact forms. These forms are the perfect way to capture leads on Facebook without having to send fans to an external site. In order to get more eyes on these tabs, make sure you link to them in your posts or when you’re running paid ads.
Treat Your Page Like a Website
Stop looking at your Facebook Page as just a way to get Likes and start looking at it as a lead generation tool. Ensure everything that is on your Page has a purpose beyond just branding. This goes for everything from the type of content you post, what kind of ads you run and even the tabs that you set up.
Generating Leads With Twitter
Using Twitter to generate leads is still a relatively a new thing. Before Twitter Cards and Promoted Tweets came along, a lot of businesses had no idea how to even get started with getting or tracking leads through Twitter. But these days, Twitter can be used for a lot more than just growing your audience, follow these tips to get leads.
Use Twitter Cards
With Twitter Cards, you can attach rich photos, videos and media experiences to Tweets, helping to drive traffic to your website. Simply add a few lines of markup to your webpage, and users who Tweet links to your content will have a “Card” added to the Tweet that is visible to their followers.
The different Card types each provide a different experience.
- Summary Card: Title, description, and thumbnail.
- Summary Card with Large Image: Similar to the Summary Card, but with a prominently featured image.
- App Card: A Card with a direct download to a mobile app.
- Player Card: A Card that can display video/audio/media.
To successfully use Twitter Lead Generation Cards, you should aim to use an eye-catching image, make your copy very appealing and keep an eye on your statistics to ensure they are resonating with your audience.
Track Brand Mentions
If you are not listening to what people are saying about your company on Twitter, you could be missing out on easy leads. It is crucial to have some sort of social media monitoring tool in place that lets you track conversations happening and never lose out on a missed opportunity.
Some examples of what you can track are:
- Mentions of your company name
- Industry related keywords
- Common misspellings of your brand name/products
- Mentions of your competitors
Create Events
Twitter chats, Ask Me Anything (AMA) and other creative events on Twitter are useful for generating leads. The key is to make sure that you have a call-to-action for each campaign. By hosting a relevant industry related event on Twitter (not in a directly salesly way about your company), you are offering free value which will naturally encourage people to want to know more about the business hosting the event, thus translating into new enquiries and leads for you.
Go Live
Going live is a great way to directly interact with your followers and engage with them in real-time. Live chats give you the opportunity to position your brand as an expert in the industry as you can answer questions, gather feedback, and generate awareness about your products or services. You can also use this medium to direct participants to branded content, landing pages, and other offerings. Do not forget to maximise engagement by sending all participants a shout out for participating at the end.
Generating Leads With LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the top social media site for B2B leads. As it is catered toward professionals and networking, it is a natural and powerful lead generation tool.
Offer a Free Sample
LinkedIn Premium gives businesses the opportunity to find highly qualified leads based on job role and other criteria, then contact them directly with InMail. What is so great for B2B companies is that it lets you go directly to the decision makers.
Combine LinkedIn & Inbound Marketing With LinkedIn Publishing
Inbound marketing is highly effective, and in particular, content marketing is a hugely successful technique to employ. Get on board with LinkedIn’s Publishing platform as this is the perfect place to:
- Show your expertise as a thought leader
- Offer valuable information about your industry to professionals
- Gain leads
Get on SlideShare
SlideShare is a content sharing platform focused on slide decks, and they get a lot of traffic. Make sure that your SlideShare and LinkedIn accounts are connected so that your presentations are visible on your LinkedIn Profile or Company Page. To use it to gain leads you should focus on creating slide decks that are highly relevant to your target audience and always have a call-to-action whether that is inside your presentation or at the end.
Generating Leads on Instagram
Instagram does not directly cater to marketers and advertisers like Facebook or LinkedIn but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use it to generate leads.
Respond to Comments
Getting lots of likes on your photos is great, but if you are not keeping up with the comments people are leaving, then you’re missing out. By taking the time to respond to the people that are engaging with your content shows that you care, which in turn makes people more likely to buy from you.
Create Unique #Hashtags
Hashtags are almost like the new word of mouth advertising, but through social media. When you create a hashtag, you give users a new way to engage with your business. Using relevant, targeted hashtags on your posts is one of the best ways to get discovered by new audiences on Instagram. This can translate into more engagement, more followers, and more leads for your business.
You can create hashtags for several different things. For example, some of the most optimal hashtags uses include: Promotions, Events, Contests and Product Launches. Remember, before you create your Hashtag, develop your end goals and tie them to a metric to track to ensure they are a successful addition to your social media marketing strategy.
To get you started, when brainstorming a new hashtag ensure it is.
- Short and snappy
- Easy to remember
- Consistent with your brand
- Focused on one message
- Unique and not generic
Here are seven more ways that you can generate leads on social media:
Special Offers
Everyone loves a freebie, so consider offering giveaways on social media that includes an entry form to give you the opportunity to capture important lead data. Always try to incorporate a way for entrants to share the offer via their social channels so can they help spread the word with their community.
Polls and Surveys
Your followers can provide you with a wealth of knowledge, and polls offer a unique way for people to express their opinions – which they love to do! This is a great way to get feedback on vital information such as how people are using your product, what their pain points are, and what they would like to see on in the future. For bonus points, offer incentives to increase the response rate.
Refer-a-Friend
Referral campaigns are a great way to engage your followers and it might just be the nudge your customers need to recommend you to their friends and family. Create compelling offers for both the referrer and the referees such as gift card or cash incentives. There are many apps out there that can create this for you and integrate with your platforms, allowing you to easily set up a referral campaign across all your social media so you can grow your customer base fast. As every shared message will include a link that tracks the responses at every stage to the conversion event, you will be able to measure the effectiveness of the campaign.
Discount Codes
Flash deals and discount codes are a great way to increase brand awareness, generate demand and a sense of urgency. Make sure you include a strong call-to-action, time constraint to compel users and assign unique codes for each social channel, so you can track which platform directed the most traffic.
Gated Content
Social media is essentially a megaphone to get your content out in the world, and by developing posts that direct them to a landing page where they are prompted to fill out a form, you can generate new leads and nurture existing ones. To successfully utilize this tactic, you must ensure your posts provide content that captures the interest of your followers. Most leads take only a few seconds to decide whether they will interact or not, so keep your landing pages simple, design minimal and use images, gifs, or stats to increase interest without overwhelming your leads.
Paid Social Ads
Each social platform has a unique demographic criteria that allow you to target ads so it’s crucial you choose the right platform and targeting options so you’re going after the audience who will find value in your content, and not wasting time and resources. When you are promoting your posts, be sure to include a strong call-to-action to get the most out of your investment and generate conversions.
Create Clickable Content
Simply put, without compelling content, you will not collect leads. Everyone on social media is competing for attention, and those attention spans are shorter than ever. Images need to be sharp, copy needs to be snappy and everything must be tailored towards your end goal of generating leads. Remember, you can have the best copy in the world, but do not overlook making sure people have a place to click. So always ensure each post has a clear link and tempting call-to-action.
Here are some clickable options available across different platforms:
- Tag products in your Facebook Shop
- Swipe up on Instagram stories
- Shoppable Instagram posts and stories
- Shop the Look Pins on Pinterest
- YouTube Cards and end screens
Remember, generating social media leads takes time, it certainly is not a one-day process. The key is to experiment and always be trying new ways of promotion and exploring new channels of social media marketing to keep learning and developing what works. To ultimately increase your social media leads you should always use enticing titles within your posts that you want to share on social media platforms, experiment to find a successful strategy and work on promoting it to a targeted audience and see what your competition is doing and follow that!
Scarlett Darbyshire 