Leads don’t happen by chance on social media; you need strategy to drive them. While it’s relatively easy to generate leads on social media for some, the real deal comes down to nurturing and conversion. Otherwise, your leads will stay just that — leads.
In this blog, we talk all about social media leads and how to convert them.
What Are Social Media Leads?
Social media leads are any information that a prospective customer shares with you through social media. Such information can be names, email addresses, education, occupation or any demographic data which you can use to inform your lead nurture campaigns and follow up with your prospects.
The Three Phases of Social Media Lead Generation
Here are the phases of the sales funnel that a lead must go through until it reaches conversion:
1. Social media lead generation. The top-of-funnel zeroes in on lead generation, where you initiate consumer awareness and interest towards your business’s products or services.
2. Social media lead nurturing. The middle-of-funnel is all about lead nurturing, where you fuel consumer interest, reinforcing them through campaign messaging and targeting.
3. Social media lead conversion. The bottom-of-funnel ends with lead conversion, where you successfully turn your prospective customer into an actual paying customer.
Why a Lead Nurture Strategy Is Important
A lead nurture strategy is a decision-maker as to whether the lead will drop off in the middle of the sales funnel or successfully convert. Without running lead nurture campaigns, you’re highly likely to lose revenue.
As mentioned, in the lead nurturing phase, you fuel a consumer’s interest in your brand, keeping them engaged and, thereby, filling the gaps. In most cases, the leads you gather are not entirely ready to make a purchase. Rather, the leads are in the learning stage, trying to know more about your offerings and weighing them against other options from your competitors.
Similarly, for business-to-business (B2B) lead generation, a lead nurture strategy is your means to court those with authority to make purchase decisions on platforms like LinkedIn.
Top Three Social Media Platforms for B2B Lead Generation Services
Run your B2B lead generation and nurturing campaigns on these platforms. For business-to-consumer (B2C) lead generation, you can also consider these channels, especially the latter two.
As of writing, LinkedIn has over 900 million members. While that figure is not up to par with other major platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, which brags about 4 billion users collectively, LinkedIn beats them as a business-centric platform. LinkedIn has about 58.5 million companies and 130 thousand schools listed, so if B2B lead generation is your primary objective, LinkedIn is your top horse.
Perhaps the most popular platform is Facebook, boasting nearly 3 billion monthly active users. In January this year, Meta’s advertising resources revealed that marketers could reach about 2 billion users, or a third of its total users, with ads on the platform. But with such potential, Facebook can be incredibly competitive for any lead generation agency, so later, we’ll look at tips to help your set business stand out.
In the last quarter of 2022, Instagram data shows a steady decline in active users. But leading up to January this year, marketers’ total potential reach on the platform is at about 1.4 billion users. Thus, Instagram is still a worthwhile platform to warm up user interest in your brand and explore brand partnerships. Given its highly visual nature, Instagram is a wise choice for businesses in the eCommerce space.
How To Generate Leads On Social Media
Let’s dive into essential tips to generate leads on social media for your business.
1. Optimize Your Social Media Pages
Starting with the basics: Your social media pages should be fully optimized to attract and collect leads. When your profile or page has incomplete information, you come across as questionable, driving potential customers away. So you want to maximize every section when setting up your page. For instance, on Instagram, you can add a link to your bio.
Top platforms such as those we mentioned above allow you to add a call-to-action (CTA) button in business pages, serving as in-platform social media lead generation tools.
2. Employ Content Distribution Across Your Channels
Your content is the backbone of your lead generation and nurturing campaigns. But before you get overwhelmed, know that you don’t necessarily have to produce new content to drive leads. You can identify your evergreen content that elucidates your offerings and then repurpose them. For instance, evergreen content could be a blog that explains product features.
Many lead generation services experts also bank on customer success stories for content distribution. Such content directly speaks to consumer doubts. Similar types of content are product reviews.
3. Run Social Media Paid Ads
In-app social media lead generation tools are found in the social platforms’ respective ad managers. You can run social media paid ads with “lead generation” as an objective. Such ads allow you to set up dynamic ads to collect information such as email address, full name and phone number, among other demographic data, which you can use to follow up with prospects.
For lead nurturing, Facebook’s retargeting option is especially powerful. But first, you must install Meta Pixel, formerly Facebook Pixel, on your website. Instructions are in the Meta Business Help Center.
4. Explore Automated Lead Generation Through Chats
Every social media platform has a messaging feature. You can maximize those features by initiating conversations with users when they’re on your page or website. Or you can set up automated responses or instant replies to assist customers even when you’re offline. Identify common questions customers have for a more effective automated lead generation.
Additionally, Facebook offers a free chat plugin that you can add to your website, allowing you to engage with your customers as they browse your website and even after they leave.
5. Partner With Social Media Influencers
Social media is the playing field of influencers, and many brands are all for it. Marketers reveal that influencer marketing is not only effective but also inexpensive compared to running advertisements. To further the case of the power of influencer marketing, Statista revealed that 60% of video views on Facebook are attributed to videos from Influencers.
Make sure to partner with influencers that highly resonate with your target audience. And as with any marketing campaign, it’s fundamental to determine your key performance indicators (KPIs) beforehand.
6. Consult With a Lead Generation Agency
Business owners have a lot on their plates, considering the day-to-day operations of running a business. A lead generation agency, on the other hand, has one goal: to generate high-quality leads for its clients. When you call in the experts, you’re guaranteed results without you doing the heavy lifting.
Take the time to assess an agency’s expertise by checking case studies, client testimonials and reviews. You can even ask for referrals to better inform your decision.
Powerful Lead Nurture Campaigns That Result in Conversions
Our team at Thrive is an expert in turning leads into “hot” or qualified leads. Such leads are convincingly nurtured and are ready to convert.
If you want to run social media lead generation and nurturing campaigns, our team can help. We are proficient with any social media platform suited to your business needs.
Talk to Thrive’s lead generation services team — never lose a lead again!
