Over the last decade, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram have been one of the fastest growing forms of media and communication in the new digital era. For businesses, using social media for lead generation has become a very effective way to market and advertise their products and companies, and also communicate with customers and other companies in a widespread way.
If your are in a company which focuses on developing sales leads and nurturing relationships with prospective clients, via an inbound strategy that attracts visitors to your business, then social media sites can be a great way of generating leads for your company.
Real quick lets recap on some of the basic terms:
- Lead – A person who has expressed interest in your company. It can be as simple as a person who submitted their information to a form on your site, or someone who has directly contacted your company inquiring about something.
- Lead Generation – Generating leads is simply the process of attracting visitors in an attempt to convert them into leads.
- Inbound (Marketing) Strategy: As opposed to traditional marketing such as cold calling, inbound is the process of attracting visitors to your business by delivering meaningful content, in the hopes of converting said visitors into leads and eventually customers.
So, if you are a business who generates a lot of its sales leads and prospects from the internet, or your company website, it is necessary to have an inbound strategy in place in order to generate the most traffic to your site. And an integral part of this inbound strategy is a social media campaign.
By creating profiles for your business on multiple different social media platforms, you are opening up multiple new access points to your website. Just like a link to your company’s website appears on Google, social represents another way for customers to reach your site through Twitter or Facebook, or any other social media platform.
Social media is a great way to communicate with potential customers, clients, other businesses and more. To list a few advantages that using social media can provide for your business:
- Distribute information to a large web of people
- Gain feedback from your customer base
- Share important sales or news with followers
- Develop a relationship with your followers online
Having multiple social media profiles for your business simply increases your digital presence, the sum of all of your online activities (web page, YouTube profile, Facebook page, etc.). Meaning that each social media profile a business creates increases their efforts to reach the most people possible digitally.
The strategy behind lead generation includes two key parts: attract and convert. Ideally we want to attract visitors to our website hoping we can convert them to leads by getting their information such as first and last name, and email. We can attract leads really effectively through a social media strategy, mainly because it is a very easy way to deliver valuable content to a targeted audience.
Sharing a recent blog post on Twitter attracts visitors to your website or social pages, but there is also the interaction aspect of social media that allows businesses to connect with prospects and other businesses. It creates an outlet for finding leads and a place where you can begin to develop a relationship with them.
Social media is a critical tool for any business and serves as an effective tool for advertising, marketing, and increasing your customer reach online. As a business, make sure that you are utilizing it frequently.
Download the Social Media Planning Template: it helps you plan out your social media posts by platform and day.
