4 Tips and Tools to Help You Generate Leads from Social Media
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A Seriously Social Community Article by Lilach Bullock
Wondering how to generate more leads from social media? Social media isn’t just a place to promote your business, build brand awareness and drive engagement.
Using the right tactics, social media can actually be an amazing source of leads and even, ultimately, more sales.
In this blog post, discover four tips and tools to help you generate more leads from your social media profiles.
#1 Use Live Streaming to Generate More Leads
Video has constantly proven itself over the last few years as one of the best-performing types of content. In fact, a study found that 76% of marketers believe video marketing has helped them increase sales.
But what about live streaming? For one thing, 80% of consumers say they’d rather watch a live video from a brand than read a blog. Even more than that, 82% of consumers say they prefer live video from a brand to social posts.
And luckily, this also brings a great opportunity for brands to generate more leads, by using live streaming. But in order to generate leads, you need to provide them with something of value: i.e. knowledge. That’s why one of the most effective ways to use live streaming for lead generation is to host a live webinar on your social channels, teach your audience something useful, provide value and turn them into leads or even customers.
To help, you can use ClickMeeting, a full-suite webinar tool which also allows you to stream your webinar on YouTube or Facebook, easily.
Make sure to leverage all of your different channels to promote your live streaming webinar and get as many people to watch as possible; the more people are watching, the more people you could potentially convert into leads.
#2 Hold Social Media Contests and Giveaways
Another sure-fire way to generate leads on social media is by holding a contest. It’s a great way to get people excited and talking about your brand, engage them and get them interested in your products or services.
However, that doesn’t mean that just any social media contest will get you results.
That’s why your prize is incredibly important: the right prize will help you generate leads. The wrong one will get you attention from people who have no interest or need for your products and/or services.
In order to ensure you’re generating quality leads from your social media contest, you'll need to remember two important things:
- Your prize needs to be good enough that people actually want to win it
- And at the same time, it can’t be too generic: it needs to be a prize that is relevant to your target audience
In other words, iPads and iPhones don’t make for good prizes. It’s true that they’re likely to generate a lot of engagement and a lot of attention but if they’re never going to buy from you, what’s the point?
On the other hand, a targeted but still fun and/or useful prize can help you generate a lot of quality leads.
For example, here’s a giveaway from GoPro and the prizes they’re putting up on the line – each one of them is highly relevant to their target audience:
To help you create and run your contest, you can use a tool like Shortstack; it allows you to create all kinds of contests and giveaways, as well as create landing pages and collect information from your leads.
#3 Promote Your Gated Content
Another highly effective way to generate leads from social media is a little more indirect: promoting your gated content on social media to get more people to sign up and leave their contact information in exchange for content they want.
Here’s a great example from Influence & Co., who partnered up with HubSpot to create a free, downloadable e-book and promoted it on their social media channels:
The reason why this works is that first of all, it targets a highly specific audience: digital marketing agencies. There would be little interest or need for this e-book if you weren’t working in an agency – which means that those who do sign up to get their free e-book, will make likely be highly qualified leads.
Plus, if they want to download the book, they are first directed to a landing page and form where they have to enter certain information about themselves:
In order to generate quality leads from gated content, the most important thing is what you offer people in return; just like with giveaway and contest prizes earlier, it needs to be completely relevant to your target audience (and not of much interest to other people) so that you can ensure that every lead you generate is truly a potential client.
Try to experiment with different types of updates to see how it grows your results; sharing a link to gated content is easy enough (in fact, it’s probably one of the easiest ways to generate leads from social media), but you could also create various promotional images and videos to help promote this content on social media, as well as A/B test different social media text updates and calls to action to see which get the most people to leave their information and download the content.
#4 Leverage Social Listening to Find Leads
Social listening tools are extremely powerful in that they can help you better understand your audience. They can:
- Tell you what kind of content they like and what they don’t
- Tell you what topics they talk about the most and what hashtags they’re using
- Tell you what influencers they follow and actually interact with regularly
That bring said, while social listening tools might be great for research, their value doesn’t stop there; in fact, they can even be great tools for generating leads. So, how exactly can you leverage social listening for lead generation?
The main idea is to monitor certain keywords across your social media channels, in order to discover opportunities:
- First off, monitor all mentions of your brand: not everyone will tag you in their posts when they mention you so you might be losing on some opportunities to sell
- Monitor your competitors' names: for example, you might find people looking for advice on your competitors, complaining about your competitors and other similar situations that could be great opportunities to generate qualified leads; for example, a tweet like this from a disgruntled customer could mean a new customer for you, with the right approach:
- Listen for people searching for products and/or services like yours: people often use social media to get advice and tips, to research products/services and get recommendations from other users.
- Monitor specific locations (if relevant): if you’re only serving certain areas, this will help you find highly targeted leads.
Ideally, you should experiment with different keywords and groups of keywords (as well as negative keywords – i.e. keywords that you want completely excluded from your search) to find as many leads as possible.
Once you find them, it’s time to engage with them and try to convert them: talk to them directly, engage with their content, respond to their messages and offer them useful resources when relevant.
Conclusion
Social media can truly be an amazing source of leads and sales – not just a way to boost up your brand’s social proof with likes and shares.
Leverage the strategies outlined in this article and it will help you generate more leads from social media, consistently, and ultimately, help you grow your business into a bigger success.
About Lilach Bullock
Highly regarded on the world speaker circuit, Lilach Bullock has graced Forbes and Number 10 Downing Street with her presence! In a nutshell, she’s a hugely connected and highly influential serial entrepreneur – the embodiment of Digital Intelligence.
Listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers and likewise as one of the top social media power influencers, she is one of the most dynamic personalities in the social media market and was crowned the Social Influencer of Europe by Oracle. Recently listed as the number one Digital Marketing Influencer in the UK by Career Experts. She is also a recipient for a Global Women Champions Award (by the Global Connections for Women Foundation, GC4W) for her outstanding contribution and leadership in business.
About Ian Anderson Gray
Ian is the founder of the Confident Live Marketing Academy and is the host of the Confident Live Marketing Podcast. He helps entrepreneurs to level up their impact, authority and profits by using live video confidently. He's a geek, husband, and dad to two kids, and trained as professional classical singer. He lives near Manchester in the UK. Find out more
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