5 Powerful Ways to Use Social Media for Lead Generation

Clued-in business owners and marketing managers aren’t just using social media to boost brand awareness — they’re also leveraging these platforms in order to generate leads.

By stirring up interest and encouraging users with a call-to-action, sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter can all be used as powerful marketing funnels to capture potential customers’ email addresses.

Here are five simple yet highly effective ways you can gain leads through the use of social media.

1. Listen to Social Needs

So much emphasis is put on promotions and sharing content, you can forget about the most important aspect of social media: listening to your audience. What are the hopes, needs, fears, and dreams of your target market? Listening to your ideal customers and clients enable you to serve them better, craft more compelling content, and ultimately improve your opt-in rates.

Pro tip: Where should you listen to your customer targets and eventually interact, joining in the conversation? Check out LinkedIn Groups.

2. Create a “Pink Spoon”

The “pink spoon” refers to a freebie, such as an e-book, audio file, webinar or digital course, which can be viewed or downloaded when someone enters their email address in an opt-in form. We also call these “lead generation offers.” Ensure your “pink spoon” offers great value and helps to solve an issue for your target market. Promote your “pink spoon” on your social media networks, and link back to your website to capture new leads.

Pro tip: It’s not enough to promote your freebie once or twice. Schedule several different social media “teasers” multiple times over the course of several months to get the most from your offer.

3. Host a Webinar

Online seminars not only provide a way to build on your brand’s expertise, they also hook in customers and capture hot leads. Use a combination of paid LinkedIn advertising, LinkedIn updates, paid Facebook ads, Facebook posts and promoted tweets to market your webinar and build your list.

Pro tip: It can take 40 hours or more to plan, write, rehearse and conduct your first webinar. If you decide to go this route, then you can also use the content from your webinar as blog posts, helping further fuel your social media efforts.

4. Integrate All Platforms

Every single one of your social media accounts should link back to your website. If a visitor wants to connect with your business but they can’t find where to go, you will have lost yourself a lead. For continuity and professionalism, use the same usernames across all of your social media platforms.

Pro tip: You may want to consider linking to your LinkedIn profile from your personal social media accounts. Because you can see who views your LinkedIn profile when you visit LinkedIn, you can see who might be interested in doing business with you.

5. Monitor Your Success

Use Google Analytics to measure the stream of visitors coming from social media sites, the number of opt-ins, and the effectiveness of your paid social media campaigns. Split testing allows you to control and tweak landing pages for the best conversion rates, continuously improving your tactics in order to get the best results.

Pro tip: We use HubSpot to publish and monitor social media because of the analytics we receive from the software. Scheduling social media in HubSpot saves us several hours each week, and we can get interaction statistics to find our most popular messages, too.

Do you have any questions about using social media for your lead generation efforts? Leave them in the comments below.

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How to Improve Your Social Media Monitoring and Understand Influencers

Success in social media marketing comes from consistency and understanding your audience. Consistency is the easy part here, just stay focused on your campaigns and keep working hard. But how do you understand your audience, and more importantly, how do you make a lasting impression on them, and eventually convert them into buying customers? This is where metrics comes into play. There are a lot of tutorials and guides that explains different metrics and how they affect your social media marketing. So we will not insist on that for now. Instead, we will talk about social media monitoring and how you can use it to find and interact with influencers.

Why Social Media Monitoring?

Monitoring your social media campaigns is a vital element in marketing via social media platforms. It might seem like a secondary objective, but, in fact, it is one of the most important factors to follow and understand. This also allows you to identify the so-called influencers in your niche. Understanding influencers is important because they can make you or break you with their following. Think of them as the celebrities of social media, and understanding them can help you win their endorsement for your social media campaigns.

Source: Unsplash

Social Media Monitoring Tools

The whole concept of influencer marketing is based on communication, and this is where monitoring the social media feeds comes into play. By putting in place effective measures for monitoring your social media marketing efforts you can communicate with potential buyers, interested parties and influencers. Monitoring can be done via multiple different platforms, and many different experts in the field recommend different methods of monitoring. We will go through a few of the most popular tools, how to leverage them to your advantage and finally, how to make influencers notice you and help you in promoting your social media campaigns.

BUFFER

Buffer is one of the best-known players in the game to date. They took the market by storm and are still controlling many of the major social feeds for numerous large companies and agencies alike. It offers a free version of their services, but for a more efficient and dominant control over multiple social media platforms and accounts, you might want to consider upgrading to their paid plan. Buffer allows you to monitor the effectiveness of your social media efforts in relation to the number of replies and impressions they receive, allows you to communicate directly with your audience and provides you with informative statistics and graphics to easily identify optimal times for posting, commenting and everything in between.

HOOTSUITE

Hootsuite is probably the largest social media management tool that corporations all around the world use to enhance their brand management in the social platforms. It allows you to listen, measure engagement, collaborate and securely operate your social media monitoring efforts from a single easy to use dashboard. Sounds temptingly convenient, doesn’t it? Well, that it is. There is a good reason Hootsuite has managed to grab major corporations and turn them into clients, with examples like HBO, Virgin Group and Facebook using their services to manage their brands on the social media platforms. Enhanced reports are provided to social media managers, which disclose all of their strengths and weaknesses, from posting times to audience engagement. Hootsuite also excels in influencer marketing, because you can identify influencers using the Klout score each user has. We’ll discuss Klout later on in more detail.

BRANDWATCH

Brandwatch is the oldest of the three, and going stronger than ever. It might not have had such an explosive start as the two other tools mentioned above, but it certainly has a strong and loyal user base. Companies such as Seat, PepsiCo and Virgin Australia are using Brandwatch to provide them with analytics and monitoring over their social media and brand image. Brandwatch differs from the other two in one major feature, it focuses heavily on the analytics side. The analytical powers of this tool go way beyond your standard social media management tools, as you can easily identify influencers, gather data automatically from all over the web with support to 27 languages, respond to your social media audience and solve PR problems instantaneously. However, the robust features come in at a price, which is a hefty $800 per month to begin with. But the good news is, they have an integration with Hootsuite, allowing you to make use of the robust analytical powers of Brandwatch and manage your social media with Hootsuite. For anyone interested in the market's most efficient social media monitoring tools, a combination of these two will definitely get you on your A game. Combine these with Mass Planner and you have the perfectly automated social media campaign together with robust analytics and effective monitoring.

Source: Unsplash

 

How To: Influencer Marketing

Now that you are familiar with some of our favorite tools for monitoring your social media marketing efforts and communicating with your audience, it’s time to dig deeper on influencer marketing. Social media, just like any other form of media, or even many sports, have their own influencers, listened to and respected by a mass following. Think of Warren Buffet giving out investment tips or recommendations, but just a niche specific and social media focused version of an event like that. Having an influencer supporting your brand is a powerful asset to have to support your brand.

We mentioned Klout score earlier, and now it’s time to explain it in more detail. Klout is a company that ranks social media users based on their influence. It uses different metrics, which include the very same ones we mentioned in our previous article, and give each user a Klout score. The higher the score, the more powerful the influencer. Kloutis a handy tool to identify influencers, and Hootsuite for one allows you to see the Klout score of each person engaging with your brand via social media. Identifying social media influencers is the mandatory first step to turning them into powerful allies.

Another way of identifying influencers in your niche is to use Google, for example finding influencers in the food niche could be done by searching for “Food blog” on Google, and opening up the few blogs that come up first. Usually, a combination of both methods can give you the best results.

After you have identified the influencers commanding a followership in your niche, it’s time to start communicating with them. Engage them in their blogs, on articles they post both in their blog and in social media. Creating a first impression of you being an open and approachable brand is important, and remember to offer them value. Don’t waste their time, but engage them with creative and useful comments. This type of communication and engagement can then be turned into influencer marketing with the help of your newly found associate.

Conclusion

Managing your social media is much easier when using the proper tools for the job, and now we have given you an insight into the three top tools for monitoring your social media. Using any of these three to help with your efforts is a guaranteed boost in traffic and engagement. Use monitoring and social media listening to identify influencers in your field. Start building genuine relationships with them and you will have a powerful marketing strategy in your hands.

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Where to ‘Borrow’ Ideas for Social Media Campaigns

Steve Jobs liked to quote Picasso and say, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Marketers like to think of themselves as artists, and they should. Like artists, marketers create work that makes people rethink their opinions about what they thought they knew.

If you’re entering the world of social media campaigns, you know how much competition is out there. From the big campaigns launched by ad agencies, to the millions of small sweepstakes you can find across Facebook and Twitter, you might worry that there aren’t any original ideas left for you to launch.

There are always new ideas, but if you can’t think of an original idea and have a marketing deadline to hit, don’t fret. There are plenty of places for you to find ‘inspiration’ for your social media campaigns. To save you time and keep the color in your hair, here are a few ways to follow the late, very great, Steve Jobs’ example.

Think Before Stealing

As the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says, “Don’t panic.” Your lack of ideas might just be because you haven’t been tackling this from the right angle. What do you know? Do you know when you want to launch a social media campaign, or what kind of campaign you want to launch? Knowing both of these things can help create your campaign for you, and knowing the answer to one of the two questions can be enough to fire up the imagination.

If you want to launch a social media campaign, you probably have some idea what you want your campaign to achieve.  Campaigns are generally launched to accomplish one of three goals: lead generation, user-generated content (UGC) aggregation, or building engagement with your fans. Which of these three goals is most important to you right now?

If lead generation is your top priority, you might want to run a sweepstakes campaign. If you want to grow your UGC portfolio, a contest or social gallery might be a better idea. And if you just want to have some fun with your fans, consider running a poll, a quiz or a voting gallery as your social media campaign.

Sweepstakes and UGC contests can be defined once you know when you’re going to run it, or what prize you’ll offer the winner. If you know either of these facts, you can start narrowing down the list of potential campaign names and themes.

What does your marketing calendar currently look like? Where are the empty spaces? Do you know if there are any social media campaigns you absolutelymust run this year? If you have major offline initiatives already in the books, what can you do to support them without undermining their pull? Once your campaign is launched, your fans will have no way of knowing that the campaign was borne of an attempt to fill dead air. Once you know when to run a social media campaign, you can start brainstorming for appropriate ideas. Is there nothing going in your marketing calendar in September and October? How does your product connect with the fall? Are you a consumer packaged good product that could be packed in school lunches? Can you connect your product to the Halloween experience? Would kids want to show off using your products on the playground? How can you connect your brand to your opportunity? If you’re a one-man team, get some friends together. If you don’t have friends who work in marketing, don’t worry about it. You’re trying to inspire your target demographic, not win a blue ribbon at the fair. Accolades come when you’ve earned them.

Approaching this dilemma from the other side, what can you offer your fans? If you want to make your product or service the prize so you can gauge desire, what will make your prize  something that your fans should want now? If immediacy can’t incentivize them, sheer size might do the trick. One of our consumer-packaged goods clients once ran a user-generated content campaign (a photo contest, in their case) for a year’s worth of their products. If you can offer a prize that grand, the when of your campaign is kind of irrelevant, as any surrounding gimmick would be. Fans probably don’t remember a year later that this campaign provided them with thousands of fan-created recipes for them to try; they do remember that this company offered them the chance to win a whole year’s worth of product. Let smaller prizes be carried by charming ideas—a big honking giveaway is a big honking giveaway!

Compete with the Best

Let’s face it—a company does have to be pretty impressive to compete with you. And your competition knows it needs to keep its game sharp to stay in your league. Launching identical sweepstakes in quick succession is amateur. Instead, review their brand’s history as a whole, and see how you can make your voice distinctive.

How do they differentiate themselves? How do they speak to their fans? How does that compare to how you speak to yours? Do they offer huge prizes for their sweepstakes, or find unique opportunities for fans to create UGC? Do they have a sense of humor?

If you’re keeping an eye on your competition, you know when they’re launching social media campaigns. Have they been campaigning long enough to have created traditions of holiday sweepstakes or summer photo contests? If not, there’s nothing wrong with stepping up to them and proving that you can do it better. If they have been campaigning consistently on the same occasions for two to three years, it’s better to claim the gaps in their calendar for your own. When their fans are wondering what they can do on social media, they see your bustling campaign activity, and are (at least) intrigued.

The tone of a social media campaign is as important as the content. What kind of culture are your rivals trying to create? Some businesses aim for something communal; others, like most high-fashion brands, establish a top-down culture focused on the brand’s preternatural expertise.

As long as your campaign isn’t malicious or spiteful, you’re allowed to acknowledge the competitive landscape in your own campaigns. To borrow an example of two very famous rivals, Marvel has been acknowledging the behavior of its Distinguished Competition (D.C.) for decades. They don’t pretend there’s not a competition, and how they each treat that competition informs their social marketing choices.

It’s as important to know when your competitors’ campaigns have ended as when they began. Make sure you check in on their websites and the websites of the campaign platforms that they used to see if they post a case study.

When you’re looking at your competition for ideas for your social media campaigns, ask yourself these three questions.

1. What do my competitors do well when they’re campaigning?
2. When do they do it?
3. Can you do what they’re doing better?

If you can answer these questions, you can ride that train of thought straight to your next campaign idea.

Your Fans, Your Friends

Your fans might not know exactly what they want out of your social media campaigns, but you might be able to infer from their words and behaviors online.

If you pay attention to what your fans are saying about you, you might encounter common pain points, or at least determine the ebbs and flows of popular demand for your products. Which posts and links do your fans enjoy the most? What else do they talk about when they talk about your brand—or when they don’t? What do you want them to talk about?

Facebook’s Audience Insights tab can tell you who the fans of your page are by age, gender, location and Facebook usage. On Twitter, you can search by keywords in their bios and location. Twitter might not have the raw data that Facebook does, but if someone has a keyword that’s relevant to your business in their bio, it’s an indication of interest that’s much bigger than just a Like. Your fans already have one thing in common: you. They probably have other things in common too. You might be able to tailor a social media campaign around a common interest.

If you don’t find an idea in the horse’s mouth, seek out what content your fans enjoy from other organizations. Facebook gives you the ability to search for other Pages that are liked by fans of a brand; odds are your fans have Liked a brand that’s similar to your own, even if it’s in a different vertical. Their best-received campaigns could be just the thing to guide yours to victory.

Between your history, the history of your competitors, and the conduct of your fans, something will connect to the way your brand behaves on social media. Keep the coffee brewing, and let the ideas come to you.

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Why Did Your Last Social Media Marketing Campaign Fail?

Social media makes us lazy.

We think it is a quick fix to our lacklustre marketing efforts – but it’s not.

Throw a few tweets out, blast some connections on LinkedIn and like a few Facebook pages.

That’s all it takes right?

There is a fundamental problem with the way we approach our social media marketing campaigns.

We are forgetting who they are for in the first place – our target audience.

I want to share with you some common reasons social media marketing campaigns fail and provide tips and tools you can use to increase your chance of success.

Problem 1: We don’t identify a target audience

Whether you are promoting products and services or planning a nationwide protest, identifying a target audience on social media is a necessity.

With that being said, a major reason behind the failure of a many social media marketing campaigns is their lack of commitment to identify a target audience.

This results in us sending spammy promotion to a group of individuals who – quite frankly – don’t care.

How do we change this?

First you must ask these two questions.

• Who will use my products or services?
• How does this demographic gather information?

Thankfully there are a multitude of tools on the internet that will assist you in confidently building a target audience, as well as pinpointing a strategy for how to market to them.

Useful tools

MosaicHub

MosaicHub is a great tool that helps businesses and entrepreneurs identify the thought-leaders throughout their industry. This will allow you to identify who they are talking to and what they are talking about. MosaicHub also offers a resource center where you can create and share your ideas within your industry.

FollowerWonk

FollowerWonk is a great tool when it comes to identifying a target audience. This allows you to search Twitter profiles for certain keywords in your industry, allowing you to find and build relationships with important individuals all over the world.

Problem 2: We don’t create the right type of content

Remember the questions we talked about?

The second question comes in here. When creating content to share on social media, it is important create a piece of content that caters to how your audience will want to view it.

All too often we see a business create a monotonous 3,000 word article and try to share it out to a group of individuals who aren’t willing to even read it. That is essentially like throwing a sheep into a pack of wolves and expecting them to have a conversation.

Well, okay, maybe it is not entirely like that, but you get the picture. Certain content just will not do well with certain demographics.

With social media being one of the leading factors in lead generation these days, it is incredibly important that you are creating quality, shareable content on a regular basis.

This is a great way to build yourself and your business up as a leading provider in your industry and establish trust and respect between yourself and the community.

Articles, infographics, contests and videos are all pieces of content that do very well on social media (Disclaimer: The content must be good!)..

In short, there are two things to keep in mind:

• Is it easy to read and/or visually appealing?
• Would YOU share this piece of content?

Useful tools

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo allows you to search specific keywords and it will show you pieces of content that were most popular based on social shares across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pintrest, and Google+. This will give you an idea of where your audience is and what types of content they like.

FluidReview

Contests are always doing well in the social media world, and will help you raise awareness of your brand throughout a vast community. FluidReview allows a contest creator to set up and manage a contest efficiently through a smartphone.

Problem 3: We forget about timing

Social media is a tool that you need to be using aggressively to achieve success. In the book, The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users, Guy Kawasaki stated,

“If you’re not pissing someone off on social media, you’re not using it aggressively enough.”

This is a great quote to keep in mind when managing your social media marketing campaigns; however, timing is going to be a key factor in the success of your social media crusade.

To get the most out of your social media marketing campaign it is important to analyze your audience and find out when the ideal time to put something in front of their face is.

For example if you are trying to present a piece of content to the business world, it is probably not a great idea to publish it at 5PM. At this time, most of your audience will be heading home from work and by the time they get home, it will be buried in an hour’s worth of other posts throughout their news feed. In this case, it may be better to shoot for a 1PM publishing time when people are getting back from lunch and checking their social media pages before diving into work.

It is important to understand that every audience’s ideal sharing time will differ. It is up to you to analyze this and strategize your content plan.

Useful tools

Buffer

Buffer is a great way to schedule social media posts. This will allow you to set aside some time in the morning to schedule your posts to publish at the ideal time, and not worry about missing your window of opportunity for the day. It also tracks twitter analytics!

TweetReport’s Twitter Chat Schedule

TweetReport will give you a hub of all the relevant Twitter chats in your industry – providing time, dates, and a short description. Keeping a schedule like this can ensure you will never miss a chance to share your insight and establish a name for yourself in the industry.

Overall, establishing yourself and your brand on social media in today’s world is one of the best ways to build relationships with influencers and customers. While it does require a lot of dedication, these tools can help pave the way to a successful social media marketing campaign without letting it take over your life.

Please feel free to follow me on Twitter and share any tools that you have used to assist in your social media campaigns in the comments!

Thank you for reading.

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