Leveraging Social Media to Generate Leads

Social media marketing is a necessary part of growing any business. No matter who your customers are, they’re using social media. Your goal is to find which platforms they’re on and be there. However, focusing only on self-promotion is not how you develop the trust needed to generate leads.Leveraging social media to generate leads is all about engagement. While promoting your own content is an essential part of content marketing, your social media strategy cannot be a one-way street. Only through social media engagement will you and your company generate the amount of leads to grow your business.

Lead Generation Through Social Media Engagement

1. Engage Your Engagers

Social media engagement is all about interactions. While promoting your content and rapidly trying to grow your audience, don’t forget the social aspect of the different platforms. Why has social media exploded? Because people are searching for answers to their questions. But they’re also looking for connections.That means your social media marketing strategy can’t simply involve blindly liking, favoriting, and retweeting. Be there and be engaged. When someone likes your posts, thank them. Or better yet, visit their page and like some of their posts.Such simple tasks could eventually lead to a customer.

2. Begin Conversations

This is tied directly into #1. When people take the time to comment on your posts and content, reach out to them. You’ll be shocked at how many people will respond. This includes reviews, both good and bad, as well as likes, retweets, and mentions.By engaging with the people that are engaging with you and your company, you are creating more relationships. The best way to think about social media, is that it is the world’s largest, on-going conference. Your goal is to meet and engage with as many different people as possible. Most will never buy anything from you, but they may know someone who will. That’s why interacting, providing information, and sharing ideas is so important.

3. Listen to Competitors

Because your customers are using social media, so are your competitors. The good thing, this provides a perfect opportunity for you to listen in on their conversations. What are their customers saying? What kind of content are your competitors posting? Where are they succeeding that you’re not?By using such tools as eClincher’s Monitoring, you can easily track mentions, hashtags, likes, and activities. This will keep you up to date on everything going on with your own accounts, but also with any competitors. This makes it easier to see a customer complaint about your competitor, which provides an opportunity to swoop in with an alternative.

4. Publish High-Quality Content

Social selling and social media marketing are centered around providing answers to your customer’s questions. To answer those questions, you need to post content. However, mediocre content doesn’t get shared, liked, and promoted.Every minute there are 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube and every month there are 56 million blog posts published to Wordpress accounts alone.With the amount of information on the Internet growing at such a rapid pace, the best way to differentiate yourself is to provide the highest quality content. This will develop trust with visitors, making it more likely they will return and eventually become a lead.

5. Automate as Much as Possible

You’re busy. Emails keep coming. Meetings keep happening. Plus, that report is due by the end of the week. While social media is imperative to generate leads, using social media smarter is even more important.To maximize the return on your social media investment, you need to use social media tools that will help automate your process. These include eClincher’s Publishing and Scheduling Postsfeature which allows you to schedule posts to multiple social networks, profiles, and pages. It even allows you to select high quality free images or create your own design.Another one of eClincher’s most popular tools is the Auto Post option. This allows you to recycle old social media posts by using multiple queues and Bulk Upload features. The auto-scheduler will automatically post and recycle your content once set up.

Engage Your Followers with Social Media Tools

Your social media marketing strategy needs to include engagement. It is, after all, “social”. By using the social media tools available to you, it’s easy to track competitors, follow keywords relevant to your company, and stay up to date on all notifications.Most importantly, this allows you the ability to quickly engage with those who are engaging with you. Social media is all about being there and developing relationships.This means you need to thank followers, as well as those who like or repost your content. But don’t just focus on your own content. Use the social media tools to easily post content from others. By actively engaging with as many people as possible, you are putting you and your company out there and leveraging social media to generate leads.To learn more about eClincher and how you can use social media marketing to generate leads, continue reading about the 11 New Features of eClincher or the Social Selling Partnership.