One of the most powerful lead generation machines that you have as a marketer is social media. If you think about the number of hours each day that the average person spends on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, you can immediately grasp the lead generation potential of these social networks. It’s where the customers are.
That’s especially true now that many of these social networks are morphing into mobile-first networks — as people spend more time each day with their mobile devices, they are also spending more time with their mobile social networks. Most people have their Facebook mobile app on the first screen of their phone – often, it’s the place where they start their mobile experience.
But that raises the inevitable question for B2B marketers: How, exactly, are you supposed to transform a bunch of “likes” and LOL cat photos into quality leads? Here are some quick tips on how to create your own social media lead generation machine:
Tip #1: Track and measure everything
There are many different social media analytics packages on the market today, and they can give you some very valuable insights into the types of content that people are sharing, as well as the types of messages that resonate with them. In many cases, this social media data can be used to create some very robust customer personas.
Tip #2: Post (and then re-post) all of your social media content
The problem with social media content is that it’s inevitably ephemeral – once you’ve posted a tweet on Twitter, the likelihood that anyone is going to see it decays markedly after the first hour. For that reason, many savvy social media managers schedule their content to appear at different times of the day and week. Some “breaking news” updates may only need to be scheduled once, but just about everything else can benefit from a day/night or early week/late week split.
Tip #3: Explore social media platforms where you have competitive advantage
By now, every B2B marketer has experimented with LinkedIn and Facebook. But how many of them have an Instagram or Snapchat strategy? There’s a tremendous amount of value in being part of a social media platform where you have little or no competition. For one, there’s much more room for experimentation. For another, you can generate some positive media attention for being “innovative” or “forward-thinking.”
Tip #4: Focus on engagement and not just audience size
The name of the game in social media marketing is quality not quantity. That means developing niche content that’s been specifically tailored for a certain audience. It also means posting the
type of content that is going to get a lot of likes, comments and shares.
Tip #5: Make calls-to-action an important part of new posts
Too many people ignore the potential of crafting a powerful call-to-action (CTA) when they are building out social media profiles or crafting new social media content. But if you are going to go to the trouble of posting a new research report or a new whitepaper to social networks, you have to let people know what to do with it. Even something as simple as “Get our weekly newsletter” in your social media profile can be a powerful way to get people to take a certain action.
At the end of the day, social media can be a very powerful lead generation. By following some of the tips above, you can help to turbo-charge your B2B marketing efforts.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.