Even though digital technology has given "buzz" a high-octane boost, it still comes down to hundreds of quick decisions: to share or not to share? Sometimes we find the urge to share irresistible. At other times, it's the last thing we would inflict on our social media friends. One way to make an attempt at "viralizing" your social media posts is to crank out huge volumes of them. But that can backfire, as you might imagine. What other ideas are there?
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A large number of "likes," "re-tweets" or shares is good. No question that more followers on social media is better than few. However, is the supposed attention you're getting on Facebook (have you created your Facebook Business page yet?) actually resulting in qualified leads? Are your tweets getting you contacts with interested buyers? Now for some social media marketing ideas, or how to turn those Likes into Leads.
Also, beware of requiring a re-tweet or share to enter the contest. Social media outlets usually frown on the practice of asking people to share things. Neither should you expect as many leads from a landing page that takes people outside of the social media platform. Having to switch attention to your branded page makes it obvious that your main purpose for the contest is to grab their info. But it does tend to filter your leads down to the really interested ones.
Try different formats, designs and questions to find one that seems optimal. Too many fill-ins and you'll lose people. Too few and you won't get enough data to be successful.
And by the way, don't post an insanely long link address on your feed. Go to https://goo.gl/ to translate your 100-character link to a cute little 13 character one.
An interested person will either willingly enter their info, knowing exactly why you're asking for it, or they will enter a faux address that will need to be cleaned up. Even so, the fraction of visitors that enter an actual email address in exchange for your document, video, webinar, e-book or coupon is going to be more than zero. More than you'd get if you didn't offer gated content at all! And, if you've built rapport through your social media marketing activity, the chances are much higher that readers will become leads.
Facebook offers you a long list of interests that their users have posted on their spaces, or clicked on. You can actually zero in on people who like sports, are male, get their hair cut at a well-known national chain salon and follow one or more jewelry stores. The odds are that they'll need a special wedding-day hairstyle, so give them a coupon!
LinkedIn is great for targeting companies, or finding decision-makers therein. Propose a white paper, or connect with someone in the company and invite them to connect with you.
Use your social media strategies in coordination with other marketing efforts, cross pollinate when possible so you can leverage your generosity with a white paper or contest giveaway.
If you're a local business with a brick and mortar presence and would like to connect with your immediate neighbors, social media can do that too! Say you're a dry cleaner and you want to spend some ad dollars on discounts for locals. Tools like Hootsuite enable you to send a message out to accounts in a certain radius, or use a search-based approach. You could offer your discount coupon to everyone who searched for "dry cleaner" in your zip code, city or county.
There are tools available that will harvest twitter feeds into a stream that you can mine for ideas or respond to conversations. Learn what people are saying about your industry or product in general. Understand their questions or objections or what they like / don't like about relevant topics. While this eavesdropping may not yield as many direct qualified leads as other tactics, it rounds out your overall expertise in approaching social media as a lead generator. If nothing else, you can learn from other companies' mistakes.
Social media is a personal approach to lead generation, so don't treat it like you might some other ways of advertising. It's about conversations, nurturing and invitation. There are enough nuances to it that some larger companies have added a social media manager to take care of their social media presence. There are definite do's and don'ts, so do further research and add social media to your marketing arsenal.