How to Use Social Media to Generate Leads

There are a lot of different goals that companies have when marketing online, but one goal that most have in common is that they are trying to generate more leads. The more leads you gain, the better the chance you have of increasing your customer base. One of the best ways to accomplish this is via social media marketing.

It can be difficult to measure the ROI on your social media marketing, but one thing we do know is that it is effective. Marketers spend on average roughly four to six hours on social media every week. Around 58 percent of those that have been using social media for three years or more have stated that it has helped to boost their sales.

While there are plenty of social media strategies that you can leverage in order to increase your leads, there’s one thing that you have to remember: It doesn’t matter how great your social media marketing is, if it’s not aligned with the rest of your marketing activities to reach a single organizational objective, it’s not going to be effective. Keeping that in mind, the following are social media strategies that will help you increase your leads:

Choosing the Right Social Platforms

The worldwide web is jam-packed with different social media networks, so how exactly are you supposed to figure out which one to use?

• First of all, you should probably have some kind of presence on the top three social networks - Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These three alone have billions of users. Then there’s the smaller niche channels that include Instagram, Google+ and Pinterest, just to name a few.
• Knowing your target audience is vital to choosing the right social channel. Middle-aged and older consumers tend to use Facebook while business professionals use LinkedIn.
• Does your company translate visually? If you run a software company, then social platforms based on visual content, such as Vine or Instagram, may not be the right choice. But if you run a graphic design company, then they probably are.

Choosing the right social channels requires that you do a bit of research. Keep in mind that what’s popular in one country isn’t always popular in another as well. For example, two of the top social media platforms in Hong Kong are Facebook and Sina Weibo.

Also check out our recent blog post on how you can leverage your Facebook page to attract more customers!

Create Valuable Content

One of the best ways to gain leads on social media is by posting great content. Create content that is informative and valuable to your target audience - don’t use it to just promote products and services, this will not help you gain the interest of potential leads. How-to articles, tutorials, customer FAQs, product comparisons and reviews are the kinds of content that followers will appreciate. You should ensure that the content is well written and easy to read - meaning, don’t post a 40-page essay - keep it short, simple and to the point.

Establish Your Expertise

One of the best ways to strengthen your brand identity is by establishing yourself as an expert within your industry. By doing so, you’ll help improve your brand’s exposure and reputation as well as create more trust and loyalty in your brand.

Social media happens to be an excellent way to establish expertise. By producing valuable content and posting it to your followers on a regular basis, you’ll gain a regular readership. Readers will even share your content with their own social circles. If the content is good, you’ll begin building up a reputation as knowing what you are talking about. Other companies within your industry may even ask you to do guest blogs.

Another way to establish your expertise on social media is solving problems. When someone posts a comment that is critical or negative, the way you respond can be very helpful or very harmful depending on the way you go about it. If you make a concerted effort to come up with a solution to the commenter’s problem, others will notice since you will be communicating in a public forum.

Engage With Followers

It’s called social media for a reason. You’re supposed to be social with your followers. Simply posting content and calling it a day isn’t going to cut it. You need to engage with followers. This doesn’t just mean answering questions and coming up with solutions to problems, although this certainly helps. It means fostering participation.

For example, posting a question on Twitter every once in a while and commenting on the answers that Twitter users leave. Or joining a group on Facebook and offering up advice on whatever the topic at hand is. This is how you build relationships on social media, which is a keep to creating new leads.

One of the keys to engaging with followers is to focus on how you can help them and not how you can increase your sales. That will come later, and that will come more naturally if you don’t try to force it. Although you want to be personable when interacting with followers on social media, remember to be polite and respectful as well, even if things take a turn for the worse. Someone may post something negative or mean on your social profile - do what you can to politely find a solution to the problem - never post aggressive comments as this will reflect badly on you.

Don’t ignore negative comments either - this shows weakness on your part and could result in followers thinking that the person who made the negative comment may have a point about something. This is one of the reasons why you should make sure that you are keeping track of all the comments made on your social media platforms at all time.

Don’t Act Like a Salesman

One of the biggest mistakes that Hong Kong-based companies make when using social media is that they will use it as a tool for pitching their products or services. Consumers are not on social media in order to buy things, they are on it in order to interact with people, to be entertained, to be informed and to learn new things. If you over promote your company, followers won’t look at you as someone they want to build a relationship with, they’ll look at you as a faceless business just trying to take advantage of them.

Timing is Important

Don’t be hesitant about giving customers a little push during the sales cycle to increase your odds of closing a deal, such as by sharing specific information that they may need and ensuring that they see it. For example, if a follower has interacted with you before and posts a question about a problem they have, you can provide a solution but then also provide a link to information about one of your services or products that can help prevent that problem from occurring again.

These are all strategies that you should be using in order to increase the leads for your Hong Kong-based business. Remember, listen to what your followers have to say, share valuable and relevant information with them and keep promotions to a minimum. In other words, the key to social media success is to be social - listen and speak.

To learn more about lead generation via social media, download our free eBook "How to Use Social Media to Find New Leads".