5 Ways to Generate Leads with Social Media Marketing

 Social media is a great place for positive brand communication and conversation, as well as a great platform for generating leads.

Social media is a great source to drive traffic to your website. Attracting the attention of users who are actively seeking information about the product or service your company offers.

Generating leads is a huge part of your marketing, which makes it critical to understand how you can leverage social media marketing.

Here are five successful ways we use social media marketing at IMPACT to generate leads.

How to Generate Leads with Social Media Marketing

Share Offers

This is one of the simplest ways to generate new leads, by sharing your content across all social media platforms. However, don't just post the same offer every hour or so. That won't get you anywhere, besides adding you to the list of companies using social media to spam fans and followers. When sharing your offers consider adding photos, visual content gets 53% more likes than the average post

Don't just use Facebook and Twitter to share your content. Look and see which social media platforms your target audience is using. Are you more likely to find your audience on LinkedIn, Instagram or Pinterest rather than Facebook and Twitter? Don't just use those platforms to share your content, consider sharing the content of others. Develop a list of industry thought leaders, people or companies within your industry you want to retweet and engage with on social media.

Connect Blog to Social Media Accounts

Connecting your blog to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts is an indirect but effective way for your company and brand to attract new leads. Wouldn't you love for a tweet to go out automatically immediately after your blog post was published. You don't want to miss those precious minutes where you could have increased the likes and shares of your content.

If you're using HubSpot's marketing software this tool is included. Giving you the option to automatically publish your blog to Twitter and Facebook the second it goes live.

Benefits of connecting your blog to social media accounts:

• Blog is posted on social media accounts as soon as its published

• Don't lose the opportunity to generate new leads by posting blog 30 minutes after it's live

Respond to Comments

Don't just respond to a comment saying, Hi Jane Doe thanks for your feedback and reading our blog. Depending on the type of comment they left consider including links to your companies blog articles and landing pages. Allowing you to provide them with additional resources related to their comment or question. Social media is a great platform to connect and develop relationships with your fans and followers.

When a prospect sends you a question, think of that as an opportunity to give them feedback and to showcase your industry knowledge. However, you don't want to add a link to a landing page or blog article every time, especially when it's not warranted or helpful.

Use Hashtags

Social media marketing is everywhere. Hashtags are a great way to integrate keywords and trends into your marketing campaign. Adding a hashtag allows your tweets to reach anyone looking for a particular hashtag. Hashtags provide you with the means to expand the reach of your content. Not only will your followers see your tweets but also those searching that hashtag.

Are you looking for more information about inbound marketing, consider searching these hashtags; #socialmediamarketing, #inboundmarketing, #marketingautomation, #leadnurturing, #blogging, and #contentmarketing.

 Hashtag best practices:

• Don't over-tag a single tweet, use no more than 2 hashtags per tweet

• Use hashtags only on tweets relevant to the topic

• Hashtags can occur anytime in the tweet - at the beginning, middle or end

• Don't add a space between words in hashtag

Expand Your Reach

If you aren't sharing your offers, connecting your blog to social media, responding to comments and using hashtags how do you expect to reach your target audience. The more people you are sending your content and information to the higher your chances of generating leads.

Consider growing your fans and following by:

• Optimizing your social presence

• Promote your social presence everywhere

• Share useful and valuable content

• Add social sharing buttons to all of your content

• Find, follow and build relationships with people in your industry

• Interact with fans and followers

It is important to remember that not every social media platform is going to be the same. Each platform has its own strengths and functionality. One mistake you should stop making is publishing the same content and message in each platform. The audience on Facebook is going to be different from Twitter. therefore, you need to develop a social media marketing strategy that will push different content to each audience helping your company to expand your reach whether its by implementing hashtags or creating visual content.