8 Smart Ways Small Businesses Can Generate Leads Through Social Media

Social Media has gone way beyond the “like, share & comment” phenomenon. Today, it’s about business, product selling, lead generation, and more. You may have noticed the Facebook notification with an “invite to like page” often from your friends or known ones, this is a core business strategy to influence users’ purchasing power.

Why are businesses targeting social media platforms to generate leads?

According to the smartinsights report, 1,870 million users remain active on Facebook followed by 600 million users on Instagram, and 312 million users on Twitter. Thus, businesses can easily reach out to a large group of audience in a few seconds through these platforms.

With the passing time and evolution of the internet, social media has got the utmost importance. Who knew social media sites like Facebook, Twitter would proffer business organizations a wide space to promote their products and help them in generating leads? None of us!

In this digital age where users are solely dependent on technology for everyday tasks, marketing professionals are making the use of this technology as a weapon to catch users’ attention and generate potential leads.

Below are the 8 smart ways you can employ to generate potential leads through social media.

Before diving deep into the strategies would like to quote the words of Ian Cleary, the founder of RazorSocial “Without a clear strategy in place, tools won’t make a difference”. This implies everywhere and therefore, myriad of top digital marketing agencies plan before stepping into the ocean of words, images, and videos.

Here we go;

Identify your targeted audience and know the best time to post:
Before starting marketing your product learn about your audience, their behavior, and purchasing patterns because it helps you in planning and executing the right strategies at the right moment.

For instance; an eCommerce store like Forever 21 will target the millennial generation because of the products it has on its shelf. It carries an exclusive and trendy collection of apparel, jewelry, accessories that the youth would love to buy. Hence, this stylish and elegant eCommerce store would promote it using enthralling marketing strategies to grab the attention of those groups of audiences only.

Different organizations have their best days and time to post. In fact, timings often vary by which platform you are using, user interaction with the platform, etc. Apparently, business organizations remain highly active on Wednesdays and Thursdays while it's reverse on Mondays and Fridays. Still, it depends upon how users are interacting with your company on social media. However, Hubspothas designed a set of guidelines to refer to and find out the suitable timing to post on different platforms.
Choose the right social media platform:
Your audience would be different on all the social media platforms. If we go with the above statistics, yes, Facebook is at the top but that does not mean you would only target Facebook to execute your strategies. There are other major platforms like YouTube, Whatsapp, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and a few to name.

YouTube is the best option to promote your product through beautiful storytelling videos. YouTube allows you to create your own channel and upload videos with a description and a link to your website and relevant web pages. You can change the settings from private to public and make it accessible to users worldwide.

Following the footsteps of Facebook and Twitter, Whatsapp has also opened the doors for product marketing. The status feature which is a recent update allows you to promote your products via videos, text, and images.

LinkedIn, being a professional social media site helps you to target the like-minded people who would either be interested in partnership or in buying your products.
Create an account/business page on major social media platforms:
This is one of the effective ways for generating potential leads. After choosing the right social media platform for marketing, create an account or business page to start your marketing activities, and increase followers. In today’s era, users recognize your company’s genuineness through Linkedin or Facebook account. They analyze your account, glance over your recent activities, and then decide whether to buy your services or not.

According to the infographic report designed by Ambassador, 71% of the customers who have a positive service experience through social media are likely to recommend that company. Even if you hire one of the top 10 digital marketing agencies for your product marketing, it will give you the same advice.
Share the company's online reviews on social media platforms:
Online reviews play a major role in boosting your company’s online reputation. Your product defines your company’s services, thus, allow your customers to pen reviews on different genuine sites that you can share on your social media platform with relevant hashtags and a catchy snippet for others to know.

Do you know that one thumbs-up review can increase 18% of the sales and consumers are likely to spend 31% more on business with positive reviews? If you don’t know learn about it now. Share as many online reviews as you can to get relevant leads for your business.
Use Quora:
Today, users are looking for valuable stuff on social media, something that solves their query. And, Quora is the best platform for that. It brings solution from expert professionals giving users a room to read, upvote/downvote and leave comments on those answers.

For instance; If you wanna know about specific mobile technology, Quora gives you in-depth information including its tools & frameworks, benefits to business, pros and cons, directly from the experts’ voice.

This is one of the good approaches you can use to target real audience for your business.
Run Contest:
The contest should be exclusively designed in a way that adds value to your business. Moreover, running a contest on social media should fulfill two important factors; The first one is a winning price to users whereas the second, it should catch the attention of like-minded people.

Winning the prize? Yes, winning price. Who would play the contest without a prize? None. Running a contest is not a huge investment as you are thinking. It is a simple strategy to acquire users.

What can be a good prize for a contest winner? An extended 6 months subscription to your product or one-time utilizing your services for free. Well! There are various such options you can think of to make the contest interesting for users.
Use Gated Content:
Gated Content is one of the most trending lead generation strategies in use. From the term, it sounds like a treasure hunt as if you have asked your audience to find out what’s hidden inside the box. Have you seen a designed banner with CTA under the “Suggested Post” section of Facebook? It is a kind of gated content.

While using gated content as your marketing strategy it is important to learn about your users' journey because it will help you in framing a perfect piece of content.

Copyblogger is the perfect example to make you understand why you should include gated content.

Rather than usual marketing strategy, this time Copyblogger wanted to offer something valuable to its subscribers in exchange for their email address. Copyblogger is a content library that includes 15 eBooks and an extensive internet marketing course. Using gated content as their marketing strategy, this premium library increased email signups by 400% and earned $3,00,000 dollars in sales.
Use the geotargeted search:
Twitter facilitates you to find the relevant audience and reach out to invite them in your business. It helps you to track the tweets coming from the venue or industry conference to figure out whether or not you are a potential user.

Below are the ways to enable your geotargeted search;

→ Twitter Advanced Search: you need to login on Twitter and visit the advanced search page. It is a kind of form which you need to fill step-by-step and click on the geolocation button to detect your location.

→ Hootsuite: this popular tool also provides you the option to track tweets of various locations. It provides you this facility from the Hootsuite dashboard itself. Enter your search keyword, click on the compass arrow enabled on the right corner of the search field and there you are!

Wrapping Up

You agree or not, there is a huge scope to get potential leads from different social media platforms. You need to only reconsider your marketing techniques and strategize the new ones. The above mentioned techniques are the simple ones which you can start implementing from the initial stage of your business without investing a large amount.

Would also like to add that digital marketing or social media marketing is all about using your creativity and innovative ideas. It solely depends upon you whether you need to invest money or not.

Hope you find this blog valuable for your business! Your thoughts and suggestions are always welcome.