Lead Generation With Social Media
More and more people are looking to social media sites for generating business leads. For anyone in business, getting leads is the key to growth and success. With the growth of social media sites, more and more business owners are looking at ways they can use these online platforms as ways of promoting their own businesses, and finding targeted leads.
The first step in using social media is determining exactly what interests your target audience. You need to find a way of harnessing people’s interests to get them clicking over to your site. Start by becoming a member of the community and do your research. Find or develop a product you can give to interested leads that they must register to download (giving you their name and a contact email address).
If you’re uncertain as to whether social media works for lead generation, you’ll be reassured to know that many have found it to be extremely successful. For example, Jame-Ane Ervin reported a 400% increase in conversions after using social media, which is a huge leap! Parker Trewin from Genius.com has found that leads coming from social media sites are highly qualified, with 24% converting to sales opportunities.
One of the up and coming social media sites is Twitter, which has its ups and downs as far as its use in business. While the audience is growing there are so many “tweets” that few people actually read them all. Of course, writing a quick tweet doesn’t take long, so is something you can do in just a few minutes. The best way to utilize Twitter is by posting a lot of tweets, which will help get the word out. One strategy is to send out your tweets at the time a lot of people are getting online. It’s possible to use a tool such as Hootsuite to schedule posts. Another strategy is encouraging re-tweets, when other users re-post your message, thus getting it out multiple times.
LinkedIn is a business focused social network, so it’s definitely one to investigate. One hint for LinkedIn is to ensure your status is updated regularly. All status updates are shown on your profile, and are emailed to everyone in your network. To grow your LinkedIn network, post announcements on relevant LinkedIn groups, and even find out what other members want to know, so you can provide useful content. You can even consider creating a LinkedIn group once you get a couple of hundred members.
Other sites that can be useful for promoting your business are YouTube and Facebook. If you can create interesting, watchable videos and post them on YouTube you can develop quite a following (it also helps if you can promote your videos on other sites). Facebook is enormously popular, with millions of people across the world as members. Get a Facebook account and update your status regularly. Provide something of interest and value and you’ll soon get followers and qualified leads who want to know more about what you have to offer them.
Social media may be a fairly new phenomenon, but it’s going to be around for the long haul. Don’t stick to just one social media platform to promote your business, but at the same time, don’t rely on social media alone. Update your status regularly, and find something interesting and useful for your leads and you’ll soon explode your Web Business Marketing.
