Guidelines on How to Generate Leads Using Social Media

Social Media has impacted our lives in more ways than one. It is being extensively used by entrepreneurs to propel their business. The technique of marketing using social media is a part of inbound marketing. Social media is much more than just a way to nurture your brand name and connect with your existing customers.

The following article talks about various how inbound media drives leads with the help of Social Media.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ are the major profiles which you can leverage for audience-building. If your target audience is on Pinterest or Tumblr, then use those sites as well.

You can actually use sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram to generate genuine leads for your business. Most important social media lead generation is cost effective and produces results.

These specific strategies can help you to generate some high-quality leads.

Find out the Group to connect: LinkedIn has different groups that are divided into categories. Figure out 3 to 5 small groups that most accurately stand for your target demographic. It is recommended to join small groups because there will be minimal competition and better prospects for consideration.

Target trendy discussions: It will be wastage of time if you only try to join every discussion. Instead, search for the trendiest discussions – these will have the most visibility. These discussions attract a lot of members because that usually involves hot-button issues. These discussions will be easily found on the top of the group discussion page. Read the post, review some of the comments and make a start!

Start a new discussion: Before you initiate your own discussion, make sure you spend some time in others. It is required to get a feel for the culture of the group and find out what is relevant to them.

Follow up: It’s not so straightforward keeping track of discussions, so you’ll have to proactively visit your groups and observe the discussions—in particular, the ones you started.

Start a Group: This is an ideal way to set up your authority. However, you will need to be strategic here. Create this group center on your brand name and how your message is different from that of your competitors.
For Inbound leads, LinkedIn is the top social media site. Since it caters to professionals and networking, it’s a natural lead generation tool.

Offer a Free Sample: This is a very powerful practice that can result in highly competent leads. LinkedIn Premium gives companies the opportunity to find qualified leads based on job role and other criteria, and then contact them directly with InMail. What’s so great for a user is that it enables him to get past the gatekeepers and go directly to the decision makers.

Combine LinkedIn & Inbound Marketing with LinkedIn Publishing: LinkedIn’s rapidly growing Publishing platform is the perfect place to:

1. Showing expertise as a thought leader
2. Offer worthy information about your industry that professionals will see
3. Gain some leads in the process
4. Get on SlideShare

linkedIn acquiring SlideShare is probably one of the best things that could’ve happened for marketers. SlideShare is a content distribution platform focused around slide show, and they get a lot of traffic.
After buying SlideShare, LinkedIn integrated it into the site in order to connect your accounts.
It can be applied in the following manner to gain leads:
Focus on creating slide decks that are highly relevant to the target audience. SlideShare and LinkedIn accounts are entailing to be connected so that your presentations can be seen on your LinkedIn Profile or Company Page. Most significantly, have some sort of call-to-action either inside your presentation or at the end.

Contests: Contests have been huge hits on Facebook for years. The plus is that they draw a lot of attention. The negative aspect is that the leads you get aren’t always the most qualified because you’ll have a lot of freebie seekers. But nonetheless, it’s a good way to gather emails.
Shortstack is a great tool to help you to setup Facebook contests and collect leads because it integrates with most major email marketing tools like AWeber and MailChimp.

Create a Custom Tab:  Facebook allows the user to set up custom tabs on their Page, making it a great spot for contact forms. There’s different apps you can make use of to set these forms up like Pagemodo and Static HTML. These forms are the just right way to capture leads on Facebook without having to send fans to an external site. In order to get a hold more eyes on these tabs, make sure you link to them in your posts or when you’re running paid ads.

Treat Fan Page like a Website: Shifting Page to a lead generation tool will directly impact the sort of content you post, what category of ads you run and even the tabs that you set up. For reference, You will use your website Facebook fan page for generation leads. Everything from “find our services“ tab to the “signup” Call-to-action shows that page will have a purpose beyond just branding.

Use Twitter Cards: Inbound Marketing Company uses the lead generation cards, Webtrends.

Here are some guidelines for using Twitter Lead Generation Cards:

1. Use an eye-catching image
2. Take the help of statistics
3. Enhance the appeal of your copy
4. Track Brand Mentions

Keep a regular track of the conversation. Use social media monitoring tools to ensure that you do not miss an opportunity.

Create Events:  Generating leads in a creative way use Twitter chats, Ask Me Anything (AMA) and other time-sensitive events on Twitter. Your objective is to have some sort of a call-to-action for individual campaigns.
One such example is ‘Blog Elevated’ which is a community for bloggers, centered on an annual Blog Elevated event. It uses weekly Twitter chats every Tuesday which achieves two things:

1. Start great conversation for bloggers about relevant topics and challenges they face
2. Introduces group to the brand’s event (a.k.a Lead Generation)

By hosting an event on Twitter that’s related to your business, but not directly about your company, you’re offering free value. In turn, people will naturally want to know more about the company hosting the event, which can translate into new leads for you.

1. Use Video: This works for a couple of reasons:
2. The video is creative and entertaining
3. It conveys you how to purchase the product

Nevertheless, you can’t post clickable links in your captions, that doesn’t mean you can’t include an URL. As a bonus tip, you can use a unique URL that can be tracked, so you can monitor your ROI.

Create unique #Hastags: How frequently has this happened to you? You are browsing Instagram and notice that a certain hashtag keeps popping up. As you are not sure what it’s about, but a lot of the people you follow are using it. So, you need to take a look into it and find out that the hashtag has to be created with a certain brand.
Although not exhaustive, these are some useful guidelines about how inbound marketing uses social media to drive leads.