Bertha's Blog: How To Generate Leads Using Social Media Platforms

For any digital marketer social media plays a very important role in engaging and building relationships with customers and prospects. There’s more to do with social media than just updating your Facebook status, or retweeting the popular tweets.

Of course, by keeping your social media accounts active, you can keep your audience engaged and of course increase the number of like, shares, followers, fans and so on. So, what is stopping you to generate leads via social media?

Social media can be an extremely powerful tool for lead generation and conversion, provided you use it rightly. Also ads on social media can play a huge role to generate more leads and close more sales.

For now, let’s focus on how to create content for Facebook and Twitter for maximum clicks and more conversions; the path to more lead generation:

Optimize with external content

Increase the effectiveness of your social media campaigns by using high quality content. Treat your social media content as an integral part of generating leads via social media channels.

Optimize your social media with quality content, it means, in my personal opinion, that social media platform is a marketing channel where you place your high value content, your blog content, landing pages, infographics and other resources links from your official websites.

Besides quality of content, make sure that you format it in a most clickable way for reach social media channel.

Below are few ways that you can link your external content in your social media profiles:

Social Media Channel: Your blog with a link to a relevant landing page = Lead Generation
Social Media Channel: Quality Gated Content = Lead Generation
Social Media Channel: Share only blog post to encourage your audience visit your blog page and sign-up via forms tactically placed in your blog article = Lead Generation

You can try various permutation and combinations, but when you intend to generate leads via these social media posts make sure you always link it to a relevant URL, blog, landing page, download, guide or a website.

To get your brand noticed and heard, in the noisy world of social media, is the biggest challenge. Below are two ways to optimize your content for leads and clicks via social media.

Promote your content on social media in an entertaining format and relative to the channel you’re using.
While sharing a link to your official website, blogs, or a landing page on a social media, make sure that the content is crafted, and fabricated in an interesting manner and quite relevant to the respective channel.
The thumb rule to have a successful social media campaign to generate leads is to have a compelling copy, catchy and high quality images as per the resolution required by each channel.
Content and images used for various social media profiles are different in terms of look and feel for content, and size and resolutions for images. As people visit, connect and engage in different social media platform for various reasons and each platform has it’s unique way to communicate and connect with audiences.

generate leads using social media

Stop promoting just links

Linking your social media content while every time you communicate with your audience, shouldn’t be your only objective while intend to get leads via social media accounts. Sharing a link is just a part of your social media marketing strategy, but it must not be overdone.

Besides sharing your own links make sure that you also share informative, entertaining and intriguing content which keeps your social media audience glued to your account. You can share anything which you think your target customer or prospects will find it interesting like some sarcasm on the industry, witty or humorous, quotes, inspiring story, meme, videos, tutorials or anything which might grab their attention. You can also launch contest, giveaways, poll and quiz to keep your community engaged and interactive.

Strategize your analytics

Now, when you have learned almost all hacks of social media to get maximum clicks and leads via unpaid social media, it’s time to track results and bring business at large. Following are effective ways to strategize your social media reports and analytics;

Create a goal in Google Analytics that keeps track of all your leads generated, and their conversion via social media. Begin with URL destination goal related to downloads, contact form, and sign-ups.
Google allows you to create maximum 20 URL goals, out of which I highly recommend one of them should be “Thank You” page. Other URL destinations can be linked to white papers, e-books, guides, checklists, and many more.
One of the best ways to track your social media traffic is by using UTM parameters included within the links you share in your social media posts.
UTM parameters are nothing but personalized tags which you add to your URL to analyze your referral traffic via Google Analytics. You can use Google URL builder to add the custom parameters to your URLs. Also don’t forget to mention the source i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, and campaign term while creating UTM parameters.

Some bonus tips to generate even more leads

There’s more than one way to generate leads and speed up lead conversions via social media but out of which optimized content is great way to begin with. Below are few more tips and tricks to generate even more leads:

Tweet what’s relevant to your followers
Tweet directly to leading influencers in your industry
Ask influencers or your active followers to retweet your tweets.
Whenever you post any content or link on your Facebook page make sure you tag relevant influencers or relevant audience.
Share your content and links only to the relevant groups, communities, and lists in LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Groups or Twitter.
Pay attention to concerns, answer questions, and clarify doubts relevant to your industry/product in other communities, and groups.

Over to you

Social media is usually considered a top-of-the-funnel marketing activity, great for brand awareness, education, and engagement. But it can also be used for lead generation. How have you changed your social media model to incorporate lead generation? Has it been successful for you? Tell us about it in the comments!

Images courtesy of Pixabay.