Capture More Leads Organically With These Social Media Tactics

Do you want to increase your leads while reducing ad spend? While paid ads are essential for growing your business quickly, budgets are limited. In these tough economic times, 75% of marketing leaders report needing to do more with less.

One way to make the best use of your budget is by using new methods to draw leads into a chat organically. When you’re using chat for sales, getting prospects to start a conversation is how opportunities begin. That’s a key part of our conversation-led growth framework, which begins with capturing leads.

Many customers prefer to communicate on WhatsApp, but they typically discover a business through search or social media. One of the most effective ways to get prospects to send you a message is through click-to-chat ads, which we covered in last week’s newsletter with advice on how to optimize them.

However, you can capture leads through social media with organic methods as well. Building excitement with live events or interactive posts and stories along with clearly directing customers how to contact you boosts engagement.

Here are three ways that our customers use organic social media marketing to get leads into conversations and maximize conversions.

Make It Easy for Prospects to Reach You Through Chat Buttons

The most basic step for capturing leads through social channels is to make it easy for them to reach you. Of course people can send you a private message when they visit your social pages, but often visitors need additional prompting.

With Facebook, you can add a chat button to any post and choose whether it goes to Messenger or to WhatsApp. Both Facebook and Instagram allow you to add a contact button to your profile so followers can message you via WhatsApp if that’s their preferred channel.

We recommend using an omnichannel inbox, so no matter which channel prospects choose to contact you on, you’ll get all their messages in one place. Customers may use several different channels to contact you throughout their journey.

For example, a prospect may ask a question via Facebook Messenger when they first visit your page. Then later, they might see a post and click on the WhatsApp button. The more ways there are for customers to reach you, the more convenient it is for them to have a conversation.

You’ll want to make sure you can identify these prospects if they come in on a different channel to give them a consistent experience. A conversation management platform like respond.io enables you to keep all your contacts and messages in a single inbox so you don’t need to constantly monitor your social channels.

Engage with Prospects Through Facebook Live Shopping

Another way to get leads in is through live events on social media. Facebook Live Shopping offers a unique opportunity to engage with viewers in real-time while showcasing your products. This feature allows you to conduct live product demonstrations and answer questions live, creating a dynamic shopping experience.

By providing exclusive deals during these sessions, you can convert live viewers into leads. The interactive nature of live shopping encourages participation and increases the likelihood of viewers sharing the event with friends, broadening your reach organically.

One of our customers, a jewelry business, has seen success with this method. They regularly host live shopping sessions and capture contacts through comments and Facebook Messenger. This generates some sales on the spot and gets prospects into their list for retargeting.

The business builds excitement for the event as viewers know they can only see it for a limited time. Their Live Shopping events get over two thousand views and considerable engagement from comments and messages.

Customer Success Manager Joshua Loo recommends asking viewers to send a comment or private message using a code. The code is a discount code that also serves to identify how leads are coming in.

The jewelry business has implemented this method with positive results. Using respond.io, they set up a chat automation Workflow to direct prospects using the code to a specific sales agent.

Instagram Story Reply

Another innovative way our customers capture leads is through Instagram story replies. Instagram stories are often more visible than posts, and it’s easy for prospects to directly send you a message through them. When viewers send a message or even a reaction other than a ??, it will go to your inbox so you can continue the conversation.

One business in the health and beauty industry leverages influencers in their Instagram stories to get leads into conversations. Influencers attract more attention and boost demand for the product.

They also use other creative methods to engage their followers including asking questions and hosting contests and giveaways. For example, they invited followers to participate in a lucky draw contest and announced the winners one by one in their stories.

The chance to win something builds excitement and looking forward to the announcement of the winners keeps followers watching the stories daily.

Here’s another example of a widely successful story reply campaign. This award-winning initiative was used by Guinness to reach younger audiences on Instagram.

Viewers were asked to reply to the story with emojis to create a unique recipe using Guinness. This generated thousands of replies, and the suggestions were turned into real recipes. Emoji replies are a fun way to get people to interact with different categories of products as well.

Spark a Social Media Conversation Today

Have you tried any of these tactics to get prospects into conversations over social media? Most of you have probably used chat links or buttons, but it pays to consider other ways to engage interest and build excitement. Tell us your examples in the comments!

And if you’ve been inspired by this article, don’t forget to subscribe. You won’t want to miss out on more inside advice on how to boost your marketing and sales efforts through conversations. Next week, learn how Meta catalogs streamline the WhatsApp commerce process.