Social media is an important channel for engaging with your target audience and amplifying your message.
It is also an important venue for gaining qualified leads. Whether your business is B2B or B2C oriented, social media can play an important role in your lead generation strategy.
Yet, your mere presence on social media sites is not enough.
You should know how to choose the right strategies for effective lead generation and promotion. Your choice of strategies completely depends on which social networks you want to focus on.
Here are 7 effective ways to use social media platforms as lead generation channels for your business.
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1. Diversify Your Content to Generate Leads
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn are visual channels.
Thus, it is important to create visually attractive content for your business. Visual content helps in garnering quick attention from various potential prospects for your business. Aligning your content development process with social media metrics is important. Also don’t forget to create mobile social campaigns to target the mobile social audience effectively.
Here are some important tips that will help you understand how big brands diversify their content:
- Find out the likes and dislikes of your target audience by following their updates to gain an idea of perfect content creation
- Create content for social media sharing that people love to share
- Listen to your audience and read their mindset before creating social media content
Starbucks, with more than 34 million fans on Facebook is a perfect example. Starbucks used the content diversification strategy for promoting their offers.
A Facebook offer posted on its page consists of an attractive call-to-action: “Enjoy a Grand Iced Coffee, Iced tea, or Starbucks Refreshers Beverages for $1 on June 7”.
This post has a visually attractive call-to-action along with a nice picture. This post created a buzz among the Starbucks fans, and was shared by more than 13,000 people with 1,553 comments.
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2. Carefully Select the Right Social Channels
When looking to promote your business on social media, it is important to understand the networks’ culture.
Understanding the culture of the social media networks, makes it easier to select the right social channel for promoting your business.
Besides, understanding the various social networks helps in creating the right type of content.
A good example for the difference between social media networks is the different approach taken by LinkedIn and Facebook.
Facebook uses a casual approach for promoting posts and updates. LinkedIn has a professional touch. All postings and updates on LinkedIn exhibit the perfect sense of professionalism.
People use Facebook for staying in touch with their family and friends. Professionals use LinkedIn for connecting with colleagues and staying in touch with the latest industry trends.
3. Develop Communities on Social Networks
Growing communities on social networking sites is a good way to maximize chances of engaging with your website visitors.
A powerful network with a wide number of fans and followers can have a positive impact on your business. The wider your communities range, the more people will get to know about your brand and your services.
The basic tips for developing communities over social networks are listed below:
- Listen to your audience
- Create high quality content based on their interest
- Identify the right platforms
- Reward your audience through attractive offers
- Measure performance of your social media campaigns
You can invite your Facebook page followers to your Facebook Group. Facebook Groups allow you to promote campaigns that guide your visitors to your website landing pages.
Google Plus communities allow you to engage and interact directly with a large number of people, giving you an opportunity to drive leads for your business.
4. Become a Social Curator
Content Curation is a process where you create and share high quality content related to a specific topic. Social Curation follows a similar technique for developing audiences for your business.
Content curation is an effective process for businesses.
Social curators watch tweets and posts related to their industry. Curated posts are usually composed of social media posts that relate to one topic.
5. Conduct Webinars and Contests
Contents and webinars are two of the most pivotal parts of lead generation through social media marketing.
B2C businesses use contests on social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Brands use photo contests to connect with users. Users can share their real life experiences and express their creative thoughts on what role your brand plays in their lives.
You might focus your contests on the events that are currently taking place such as the seasons and holidays.
Webinars are online discussions, where experts present their in-depth knowledge on a certain topic.
Webinars are capable of attracting valuable leads because they are not only non-intrusive, but they also usually attract visitors that are interested in your area or niche of expertise.
6. Reach Out to Influencers
Influencers play an important role in promoting your brand among your target audience.
This approach consists of focusing on recognizing the vital influencers related to your industry.
Reaching out to influencers helps in developing relationships and promoting your brand to their followers.
This will not only help in driving traffic to your website, but will also maximize the opportunity of conversion rates on your website.
Influencer marketing over social media platforms is done on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other niche social media like Quora.
On Twitter, you can reach out to your influencers by retweeting and sharing their posts when valuable to your community.
On LinkedIn, you can do so by joining the same groups and interacting in discussions with your influencers.
7. Share Infographics and Videos
Infographics are one of the most widely used techniques for lead generation. and are also one of the most challenging as well. Yet, before discussing how infographics help in lead generation, it is important to know what infographics are?
According to the dictionary, it is a visual representation of exciting data about a specific topic.
Infographics consist of illustrations, charts and text with impressive graphic design. They showcase an easily understood story in a clear way.
Sharing infographics motivates customers to go through your posts. They also offer better user engagement than just sharing simple textual posts over social media sites.
Besides infographics, another effective way for promoting your business through social media sites is the use of videos.
Creating videos is an art by itself. Videos maximize the chances of effective lead generation.
If you are selecting a video for sharing over your social media business page, make sure it is exciting enough to compel the audiences to watch.
If you are planning on using simple animation with some text, then you can create slideshares and turn them into a video. Upload the videos to your social media business page or to any other video sharing platforms like YouTube.
Final Words
Social media marketing is an effective way for increasing the visibility of your brand as well as generating leads for your website.
Hence, it is important for you to use social media marketing strategies for generating effective leads for your business.
If you choose to follow these strategies for doing social media promotion of your business, you will definitely be able to increase your lead quality.
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Sandeep Sharma holds a decade of experience in designing and developing user friendly responsive websites. He also has a passion of connecting with people on social media. He can be reached at Google Plus.