With 58.4% of the world population on social media, businesses have the great opportunity to win customers and grow their business online.
It is essential to understand that the sentiment of the audience and their behavior is dynamic. Therefore, the ideas working a year ago may not necessarily get you desired results now.
The best practice for any digital marketing professional is to stay updated with the evolving technology and keep testing new social media lead generation strategies from time to time.
This article brings up some of the most effective tactics and strategies to generate leads from different social media channels that any business can use.
Here are the 12 best social media lead generation ideas that work.
1. Host Social Media Contests or Offer Incentives
People will love to share their information if you provide them with a solid reason. Hosting a contest or providing different incentives are old techniques yet still highly successful ways to collect leads.
Invite people to participate in activities you conduct or offer deals in exchange for their information through forms or newsletter sign-ups. Some of the popular ways to offer incentives are:
- Hosting social contests for photos, Q&A, fill-in-the-blanks, caption, like and comment to win, and crowdsourcing. Here is an example of a social contest:
- Conducting sweepstakes to offer your free product or services. Below is a perfect example you can refer to:
- Offering coupons or discount codes to gather customer information and to persuade customers to engage with your brand. People love discount codes and use them to buy their first product. Hence, sharing discount codes lets you acquire new customers easily.
- Sharing a link to gated content in exchange for access to whitepapers, invite-only webinars, or private Facebook Groups. Gated content is the best way to generate more social media leads.
Compelling incentives ensure better success in generating leads, based on the industry your business belongs to.
Additionally, you need to be punctual while publishing such posts so that users get enough time to see and participate in the contest.
2. Feature Referral Programs
Referral programs are another great social media lead generation idea work as well as word of mouth. When people talk about your brand and refer to your product or service, it maximizes trusting relationships for business opportunities.
Offering some discount on your customer’s next service if he/she refers to your brand goes a long way. Check out below, how wisely you can get leads by offering a discount to your existing customers.
3. Utilize Facebook’s Custom Tabs & CTA Buttons
This feature of Facebook works wonders in generating leads. The custom tabs and CTAs let you create a much richer user experience on Facebook and guide your visitors and followers to see the content on the page the way you want.
As you can see, you get the option to edit CTA on your Facebook page and get a number of expert suggestions to get the desired action done by the users.
Similarly, if you choose to customize tabs, you will be able to lead the viewer to specific sections of content. If you use various tabs, you will get different options to add suitable content.
For example, you can showcase events, feature products, advertise job listings, highlight reviews, etc.
4. Tag Products/Services from Your Facebook Page
People start noticing your products on your Facebook page when you frequently tag them to a new post or an existing one. They gradually become aware of your product offerings, start exploring your brand, and ultimately become your potential leads.
You get an option of tagging in each of your posts, just like the one below:
5. Use Instagram Stories Highlights
If you want social media leads, you need to maximize your visibility to your audience and show your solid presence in the market.
Using Instagram highlights to stories offers longer shelf life. It means usual posts that disappear after 24 hours, the stories with highlights live on your Instagram profile for more than 24 hours.
Also, highlighting keeps stories pinned to the profile until they are deleted, hence showcasing your best, brand-defining content for a longer period.
Each highlight can contain as many stories as you like, and you can keep adding to them as you post new content.
Moreover, you can also leverage Instagram ads to reach your potential customers.
6. Use Info Cards to Make Your Videos More Interactive
You should aim to provide more and more information about your product or services, and using info cards is a very effective way.
Info cards are interactive cards visible as an “i” sign button in the middle or end of the running videos.
It lets you share clickable links to relevant content throughout a video and enhance the viewer experience with relevant info.
You can add up to five cards to each video and use cards in any video you want.
When the viewers click on it, they can see other videos of the publisher.
7. Leverage Social Lead Ads
The biggest advantage of social media advertising is that it helps you target even non-customers and non-followers of your brand on any social channel, which are usually missed out on by other forms of lead generation strategies.
Moreover, with social media platforms, you get a robust set of targeting options.
Hence, you can narrow down on the most relevant audience groups for better targeting and drive quality traffic to your site.
Some of the popular platforms for social media lead generation ads are:
- Facebook lead ads come with a specific lead ad format for marketers.
- Instagram leads ads that include the option of partially pre-fill forms.
- LinkedIn lead gen forms, available as Message Ads and Sponsored InMail to target corporate audience.
- YouTube TrueView for Action ads, offering prominent call-to-action buttons to link to a website of your choice.
- Twitter’s Quick Promo automatically promotes Tweets to your target audience and Twitter Ads publish typical objective-based advertising.
- TikTok features product ads as native videos on users’ “For You” feeds.
- Pinterest ads for targeting the women audience.
8. Take Advantage of Social Media Monitoring Tools
It becomes easier to get social media leads if you could know about the people talking about your brand.
With a social media monitoring tool, you can identify those who are discussing negative or positive about your products or services on different social platforms.
By collecting the data, you can analyze consumer sentiment and identify opportunities available within your user community.
Hence, you can retarget the satisfied users and win back the followers or customers you lost once by addressing their concerns.
9. Collect Emails with Twitter Lead Gen Cards
Twitter cards work wonders in gathering new leads from this platform. The card comprises several multimedia and interactive elements to maximize users’ engagement with the tweet.
Twitter lead gen cards are more like embedded landing pages within your tweets, as you can see below.
The cards are usually in the form of a button which when clicked automatically sends along with an email address of the user without typing or filling out forms. Just a couple of clicks and it is all done.
Once you start collecting emails, what you need to focus on is better management of contact information.
The best idea is to use any of the contact management software platforms to organize customer/lead information and get better insights into their behavior.
10. Track Your Retweets
People who retweet you prove that they have an interest in your brand and hence would make for some great leads. Retweets are positive signs that you must utilize.
Most of the social media management tools are designed to provide amazing insights into your social sharing.
You can easily see the people who have retweeted you and then follow these people directly. Else, you can click over to view their profile and get in touch with a DM.
11. Focus on Geo-Targeting
With geo-targeting or location-based marketing, it becomes easier to get leads as you target an audience based on one or more specific geo-locations with a certain radius.
Almost all social platforms offer geo-targeting features to narrow down your search for your target audience.
For example, Instagram includes location-specific hashtags to your Instagram Story to expand its potential reach beyond your follower list.
Besides, Twitter’s Advanced Search provides you the option to refine your search to find out a geographic location from where the Tweets were sent, e.g. a specific city, state, country, etc.
Facebook location targeting is another option you can utilize to get the largest local audience.
12. Collect Info with Twitter Chats and AMAs
Twitter chats and AMAs were introduced to gain engagement and built a good rapport. But gradually, it turned out to be a lead generation tool.
Joining relevant Twitter chats can help businesses on Twitter find and organize people who might be interested in your products or services.
Twitter chats have proven to be very effective at raising both awareness of the brands and engaging with the followers.
Many businesses use this tool to build communication with people to get leads and address customers’ issues. Since they can make direct communication, it positions their brand as open and transparent, which further helps raise leads and build long-term customer relationships.
Conclusion
With billions of people active on different social media platforms, you are losing a lot to the competition if you are not using effective techniques of social media lead generation and social selling.
Using proven ideas is vital to ensure you grab the opportunities on social media platforms where competition is fierce.
The ideas shared in this post are some of the most proven strategies that will surely help you generate quality leads on social media.
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FAQs
1- What type of content should I post?
You should post content that is relevant to your industry, as well as interesting and/or entertaining to your potential customers.
The majority of your posts say 80% should be high-value content. It means posts have to be informative, insightful, and educational. The reason is, that such posts are shared a lot and reach a larger volume of the audience.
The rest of the content can be entertaining or fun-packed. For example, fun videos/images, GIFs, quotes, infographics, etc. You can occasionally post-sales or company-oriented content.
For greater impact, make sure your content is original.
2- How often should I post?
Most social media outlets suggest posting at least twice a week.
However, frequently posting in the main feed on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest yield better results. This is because the average lifetime of a post on these platforms is not more than a couple of minutes. Hence, you should post a minimum of once a day.
For Twitter, it is recommended to post 2-3 times a day where feeds refresh every few seconds. Posting multiple times in a day, on different days, and at different hours will capture the sight of the maximum audience.
If you are posting stories on Instagram that last 24 hours, 2-3 times a week is fine.
3- Can I repost the same content to different social media platforms?
Yes, you can. In fact, it is a good marketing practice since users are less likely to follow the same brand on all social platforms. Hence, if any of your audiences missed your content on one platform, they can find it on the other.
Also, posting the same content on multiple networks increases the possibility of post sharing to other platforms like Reddit or Tumblr that you do not use for your business purposes.
4- How can I measure social media marketing performance?
Set social Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are closely linked to lead generation and sales.
Your KPIs should be based on tracking social reach, engagement (likes, comments, shares), traffic, and conversion.
Another very effective way to measure your marketing performance is to determine your social media marketing ROI. It is the comparison of the total cost of marketing on social media and the return.
Once you have your KPIs, keep adjusting them from time to time on the basis of your marketing efforts.
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