Social media has become an indispensable part of our lives, especially for young people.
Social media has infiltrated most of all our daily activities, from entertainment, learning to doing business and more.
When it comes to doing business, businesses can benefit greatly from social media by utilizing it to build the business’ image, audience, keep prospects engaged or actually sell products or services.
Since everybody uses social media, many businesses are trying to get the most out of it. One notable example is running lead generation campaigns on social media to generate more potential and paying customers.
Understand lead generation
Lead generation or lead gen is a process of finding, targeting a group of people (a.k.a prospects), reaching out to and turning them into potential clients.
Lead generation is a crucial part of any business’ growth strategy. Effective lead generation will help feed your sales funnel with prospects who are likely to turn into your clients when given enough time to develop a demand or interest in what you’re offering.
While there can be many ways to generate leads, utilizing social media is one of the most effective strategies to do so.
In which ways can social media help you generate leads?
Many businesses haven’t been able to utilize social media to its full potential and that’s a mistake. In this article, we’ll discuss how social media can help your business generate excellent leads effectively.
Taking advantage of social media’ algorithms.
Major social media platforms have been becoming increasingly popular and attracting a lot more new users every single day. Facebook has around 3 billion users while Twitter has more than 290 million users.
Therefore, it’s very competitive to get your content in front of your audience. All of the popular social media have some sort of algorithms that are kept secret so that no one can fully understand how they really work and exploit them.
However, one thing about it we know for sure is that the platforms’ algorithms tend to reward users with consistent uploads of good content and other activities.
You might recall some occasions in which random posts by pages or users that you don’t even know about popped up many times in your news feed.
That’s because the posts are popular and the pages have input a consistent number of good content for years.
Therefore, when creating a social media page for your business, you should
- Make it look professional
- Invest the time to create good content and be consistent with publishing them
- Promote it to people that you know personally.
- Connect your business page to other places such as your website, personal social media accounts, etc.
- Don’t be disheartened when it hasn’t gained any traction yet.
Nowadays, you don’t have to wake up every day to create and publish your content on social media, instead, use some automation tools to help schedule your posts for a whole week or month in one go.
These automation tools are extremely helpful when you decided to take on social media seriously.
Some of the tools are provided by the social media themselves and free of charge. Those are FB creator studio, TweetDeck, etc.
When your social media pages have gained good traction, you will notice that your clients sometimes came out of nowhere.
They could be coming from the posts that are suggested to them, from direct messages or from their search results.
Take care of the messages on social media
Many businesses don’t pay attention to the messages that they have on social media and that could be a big mistake.
If you have done a lot of lead generation campaigns, you probably know that it’s difficult and usually takes a long time for your prospects to reply to your messages.
Therefore, when receiving a message on your business’ social media accounts, do not overlook it!
When people sent you a message, they’ve probably already seen you a few times somewhere and learned a little bit about your business.
At this stage, they will easily turn into your potential clients even if you’ve only sent them a couple of replies.
A fast response is very important also. If you don’t have people to take care of the messages 24/7, a good automated reply is highly recommended.
Your automated reply will keep your prospects interested by showing them a few interesting places where they can learn more about your business while waiting for a real person to talk to.
Moreover, the tip for replying is to try to avoid sounding like a robot. You should personalize your replies as much as you can since everyone wants to talk to a real person.
Proactively reach out and engage with the prospects to generate leads.
Everybody knows social media is a great place for making new friends. Don’t you know it’s also an ideal place for you to build business-related relationships as well?
Many business owners and executives nowadays chose social media like Linkedin as a place to find and build relationships with business partners and potential clients.
There’s no type of lead that is more likely to convert into your clients than your friends. Understanding this, businesses that sell high-value items are sending their best talents to social media to find and build relationships with people that have a deep pocket.
This doesn’t only work for selling expensive things or services but also works for pretty much all types of businesses as well.
However, this strategy requires a lot of time and effort so you may find it worthy for those that sell costly items and services.
If you think this strategy may work for your business, read the steps below.
- Proactively hand-pick the right people that you strongly feel potentially can be your clients.
- Connect with them by sending friend requests.
- Don’t jump into a conversation right afterward, instead, take the time to engage with their posts on social media.
- Once they’re aware of your existence, it’s time to send them a message. However, do not make it sound pushy, just make friends with them first.
- Be helpful to them then invite them to a call with you and other people, just to know each other a little bit more.
- When you’ve already established a good relationship with your leads, it’s time to talk about what you do and how your products or services can make life easier for them.
Leads that are your friends may just want to buy your products or services simply because they want to support you, not really because they need the product.
In the past when there were no social media, business developers usually came to places like golf courses or other clubs to make friends and find leads.
You don’t have to do it now, social media can help you do just that as effectively. It perhaps takes a lot of time but effort but the results will be worthwhile.
Use paid ads to generate leads
If you want to generate leads fast, you may want to consider using paid ads.
Most of all popular social media platforms nowadays provide a type of ads that is specially designed for lead generation.
For Facebook, it’s called Facebook Lead Generation Ads and for Linkedin, it’s called Linkedin Lead Gen Form Ads.
- You can learn about Linkedin Lead Gen Ads in more detail here
Using paid ads to generate leads is an effective strategy, especially when you can afford a big budget for it. However, most small to medium-sized businesses find it expensive and can’t stick with it for very long.
Paid ads can be very expensive, especially at the beginning. The cost per acquisition tends to go down as you go, especially when you understand how it works and know how to optimize your ads campaigns to make them more effective.
We recommend businesses try paid ads for lead generation because it can be very effective and requires minimum effort since it’s mostly automatic.
If you’re not confident about the ads’ performance stats and the way you tweak your campaigns, you can hire a professional or an agency in short term and have them optimize the ads for you.
Alternative to using social media for lead generation.
Social media can be an effective way to generate high-quality leads. But if you want to generate leads faster at a lower cost, it may be time for you to consider using a reliable B2B leads database.
A good leads database provides excellent prospects with valid contact information such as email addresses or phone numbers so that you can reach out to them.
At Limeleads, we make sure to ride with our clients for their lead generation success. We strive every day to improve our data quality and service to make sure you’ll make the most out of your time, effort and money.
- Limeleads offers free trials, no credit card is required
- We provide excellent support to help you achieve a smooth process and the best results.
- We provide credit refunds for any emails that bounced
- Big discounts for first-time users and rewards for long-time clients.
- A $79 detailed Cold Email Course to help you generate leads effectively.
- 2 layers of real-time email verifications for top-notch data quality.
Simply sign up for an account and get your free trials with us.
Conclusion.
Social media is one of the most effective ways to generate high-quality leads. You should consider trying all the strategies above to make the most out of social media.
Running a business is very hard, especially a startup. You will need to work hard and try everything that comes to your mind and works for other businesses.
We also strongly recommend trying to generate leads by using a reliable B2B leads database and cold emailing because it requires much less time and the results could be just as good.
