We all use social media and it’s great for building a community and getting to know people which is fine for personal use, but for a business you need a little more. In order to make social media useful for business you have to move prospective customers from prospects to leads. Typically, you would do by getting them to sign up for your email list, or by getting them to purchase something or use one of your services which will also get them on to your list. Let’s look at a few ways you can leverage social media to turn prospects into leads.

Work Out Where Social Media Fits in with Your Marketing Funnel

If your website is like mine, it attracts an audience that don’t really know who you are and what you do, in other words you haven’t earned any trust points yet, these people often don’t feel comfortable signing up for your email list. Especially as we all seem to get more and more spam messages, however these people will often join you on social media. In my case Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Plus.

They might have also found your social media accounts in other ways without having ever visited your website, for instance they might have come across a tweet of yours and decided to follow you. You need to look at your marketing funnel and your product funnel and work out where exactly social media fits in, and then act accordingly.

Make It Easy for Prospects to Convert

It should be obvious but just in case it isn’t, you can have multiple ways for your social media followers to sign up for your email list. For example, you can have a sign-up page on Facebook as well as on your website. It’s actually good to have segmented lists if possible, depending on where they sign up, i.e. Facebook users join the Facebook list, Twitter users the Twitter list, etc. as this allows you to better market to them.

Give Away Something of Value

It always helps to have a lead magnet that is valuable to your target buyer personas and solves at least one problem they have quickly. You don’t want it to be a long drawn-out process that they have to go through for weeks for the lead magnet to work well. It should be a quick solution to a problem that keeps them up at night but is easy for you to solve. One additional tip is not to make your lead magnet to broad as you will attract too broad an audience and you will find it much harder to convert them, than having a list of more targeted buyers.

Build Relationships with Your Social Media Followers

Don’t make the mistake of simply trying to sell to your social media followers, take the time to interact with them so that they get to know you and want to know more about you. Answer their questions, help them, and be a resource for them. The more you can show this side of your personality and engage with your followers, the more likely they are to want to sign up for your offerings.

Create a Special Email Campaign for Social Media Prospects

Remember that you should not send the same email marketing campaign to everyone. You should have different email campaigns based on where they sign up, which freebie they downloaded, etc. Each leads to the same thing, but is done slightly differently based on where the audience member is in your marketing and product funnel.

Test, Measure and Adjust

Always set goals that are specific so that you have a way to measure your results. If you’re not meeting your goals, figure out where you can adjust something to make it work better. That’s what’s awesome about online marketing; it’s adjustable on the fly and you can do it again and again and again until you achieve your goals.

Run a Contest

Ensure that you follow the rules of the social media platform you select and host a contest, using the right third party or native service to do the contest correctly. A contest can help get email sign-ups fast, especially with the viral component many contests now incorporate.

Run an Advertising Campaign

This is especially great for Facebook because you can target your ad to a really specific niche, even down to marketing only to your own groups if you want to. Running ads is a sure-fire way to get people to move from prospects to leads fast.

Most social media followers are just learning about you and want to see how you do things. They’re going to observe you for a while, and get to know you and then eventually jump on board. For the best results, use different methods to get them on your email list and then market to them differently, depending on where and how they came on to your list.