Social media is the most effective tool to make connections, grow an audience, and give a greater meaning to what you do. Experts have used social media over the years to completely transform their businesses and spread their messages. Despite so many people using social media to level up their businesses, other people find themselves stuck. They don’t know how to leverage social media as a lead generation tool.
If you fit into the category, then the first step towards generating leads is to know how to generate leads. If you want to know how to generate leads, then you are at the right place. This article will discuss four of the methods that you can use to generate more social media leads right now.
#1: Create And Promote A Landing Page
One of the most effective ways to generate leads is to have your own landing page. Upon creating your own landing page (I use Optimize Press for mine), you will quickly discover that creating a landing page does not guarantee more leads. The only way to get more leads from a landing page is to get people to see the landing page. I get people to see my landing pages by promoting them across my social networks.
Most of the subscribers I get from my blog come directly from landing page traffic that I get from my social networks. Before I created a landing page, I only had 300 subscribers. 150,000 visitors only led to 300 subscribers. In short, my blog was poorly optimized for getting subscribers. Then, I created multiple landing pages and started to promote them across my social networks. The result was a massive increase in subscribers. I quickly went from only having 300 subscribers to gaining well over 300 subscribers every month.
After you create your landing page, the next step is to promote that landing page. As mentioned before, promoting the landing page on Twitter alone led to a massive increase in subscribers. However, the way I promoted the landing page is another story. Twitter is the type of social network that people go on for a short period of time to see what’s new, and since so many people tweet on Twitter, it is easy for the timeline to get filled up. As a result, most of your followers will miss your tweets and not engage with them.
One way to solve the problem is by pinning a social media post to the top of your feed. That way, that post promoting your landing page will automatically show up on the top, even if you post something new. Facebook and Twitter have this option enabled on their platforms. Here is an example of a pinned tweet:
The tweet was sent before 2015, and yet it still appears before the tweet I sent a few minutes ago. This tweet has significantly more engagement that most of my other tweets because of the added exposure of being a pinned tweet. Most tweets and Facebook posts have short half-lives (when that half-life is over, the tweet or Facebook post basically gets little to no impressions for the rest of its existence), but when you pin a tweet or Facebook post to the top of your feed, that tweet or Facebook post has an infinite half-life which means people will always see it.
The tweet also has more engagement than most of my tweets. While most of my tweets get a few thousand impressions, this tweet has over 20,000 impressions. That means over 20,000 people saw that one tweet. Of course, the engagement isn’t where I want it (only 3% of those people engaged and only 1% clicked on the link), but those are the percentages that many tweets on Twitter generate.
How could I possibly get 300 subscribers every month on Twitter when the pinned tweet only has 275 clicks? The answer is that I constantly tweet about my landing pages. I send one tweet every hour about one of my landing pages. This is how I get numerous people to visit my landing page every day, and this is how I get my subscribers from Twitter. While the pinned tweet gets the most engagement for my landing page, the other tweets I send on a daily basis are just as important.
#2: Interact With Your Individual Followers
Have you ever heard of the saying, “Ask and you shall receive”? It seems as if the more we ask for, the more we get (don’t abuse this power). When I interact with my followers, I will occasionally ask if the follower got a chance to download my free eBook 27 Ways To Get More Retweets On Twitter. I may also ask about the Productivity Rubric or another free eBook I offer called 27 Simple Ways To Get More Blog Subscribers (I like the number 27).
I started implementing this tactic in March 2015 and saw great results from it. Some people said they received the book and went on to say how much they enjoyed it. I asked these people what they liked about the book the most and if the conversation allowed, I asked if a particular follower had the chance to grab another one of my free eBooks. I would become a part of dozens of these types of interactions every day, and the numbers show for it. I got over 110% more subscribers in March than I got in January.
How many interactions does it take? Well, take a look at how many interactions I had in January compared to the number of interactions I had in March:
Here are the statistics from January:
Now you will see the significant increase in interactions in March:
The trend is an increase in interactions that gained momentum as I asked more people whether they got a chance to download my free eBook or not. When people said they never heard about it and expressed interest in the eBook, I included the link to the landing page in the next tweet I sent to those people. Many of them ended up subscribing.
Interacting with your followers is not just important for generating leads, but interacting with your followers is also important for your overall success as a brand. Your audience buys your products, reads your blog posts, and spreads the word about you. Taking the minute or two to interact with several people in your audience will strengthen the relationship between you and the people in your audience. This relationship is important for your success.
#3: Promote Your Landing Pages On Social Media Group Pages and Forums
Social media group pages and forums about your niche are great places to promote your landing pages because both of these platforms consist of numerous people in your targeted audience. Not only do you get to promote your landing pages to your targeted audience, but the platform is already built for you. If you become a member of a Facebook group page with over 10,000 members, then that’s over 10,000 people who can potentially become leads. If you post on a forum with 100,000 members, then that’s 100,000 potential leads.
Social media group pages and forums work well because members constantly come back to interact with other members. Just as an audience keeps your brand alive, the members of a social media group page or forum keep that social media group page or forum alive by building a community on the platform. This means many people will see what you post in the social media group page or forum, and that can lead to massive traffic.
Before you take the plunge and post a link to your landing page, see how the community interacts and responds to certain posts. You want to make sure describing your landing page and then posting a link to that landing page would go well amongst the people in the community, but you also want to make sure you are not violating any rules. Some social media group pages and forums will suspend users who over-promote themselves or promote themselves in any possible manner. The rules and consequences vary by social media group pages and forums.
#4: Use Reddit
Reddit is a hit-or-miss tool in which promoting yourself can work wonders, but you don’t want to over-promote yourself. A typically Reddit post can get anywhere from no engagement to thousands of upvotes. One of the posts I put on Reddit resulted in no leads. Another post I put on Reddit got me over 500 leads in just 24 hours. The leads I gained that day did not carry over far. Within a week, I was back at my normal lead generation rate. You can think of Reddit as the spike in traffic that doesn’t last very long but allows more people to know about you. I wouldn’t rely on Reddit for lead generation, but it is an underrated tool that can either lead to zero results or wonders.
In Conclusion
If you want to generate more leads, then you must create a landing page and promote that landing page as often as you can on your social networks. Tell one follower about the landing page. Then tell another follower. Post a link to your landing page multiple times per day on your social networks.
Which of these tips was your favorite? Do you have any stories with using social media to generate leads? What tips would you recommend? Please share your thoughts and advice below.
Success! You will receive your free eBook shortly.