3 ways to generate leads through social media #30DSM – Day 26: 30 Days of Social Media

How can you use social media to attract prospects to your business?  Assuming you’re offering a sound product, a compelling offer, and are talking to the right customer, social media tools make generating leads inexpensive and time-efficient.

In today’s 30 Days of Social Media lesson Clare Lancaster gives you three ways to generate leads through social media.

Take a look.

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3 ways to generate leads through social media

by Clare Lancaster

Social media is an effective way to generate leads for your service-based business. You can build your reputation within your industry, connect with potential customers and strategic partners and use it to drive traffic to your website.

Here are three ways to use social media to generate leads.

Build your reputation

Participating in social media – through online networking, blogging and rich media – can help you build your reputation within your industry.

Building your reputation online has three great benefits – your credibility goes up, people perceive your business to be successful and a level of trust is established.

How do you start? Demonstrate your knowledge and expertise by providing useful content, helping people with questions and recommendations and commenting on blogs within your industry.

Build relationships

Social networking online allows you to build solid relationships that can result in lead generation for your business.

Start talking to people in complimentary industries, help them out by referring client enquiries and you could just find yourself in a strategic partnership.

Social networks like Twitter. have broken down traditional barriers to thought leaders – find out who they are, add them to your network and start a conversation. Building solid relationships with influencers and other authorities can result in a boost to your business.

Twitter also allows you to connect directly with media professionals – building relationships with individuals and proving them with information they need could return media opportunities to promote your business.

Always remember when building relationships – it’s all about giving, not taking.

Attract website visitors

There’s a variety of ways to use social networking to attract visitors to your website. Here are two techniques.

1. Use social networks to distribute your content by posting a link to your Twitter or Facebook profiles and adding content distribution buttons to your web page (e.g. Tweetmeme). The first step here is to create content worth distributing – if it’s not good, no one will want to pass it on to their network.
2. Create a landing page for your social media profiles. People will click on your website link in your profile to find out more information about you. Make the most of their interest with a dedicated landing page that explains what you do – how you can help that person and provide a call to action detailing what they should do next.

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Clare Lancaster – Dot Marketing

Clare Lancaster is the founder of Dot Marketing an online strategy and marketing consultancy and has been working on the Internet since 2001. She writes a business and online marketing blog for small business owners and has recently launched www.twitterguide.com.au.

Visit www.clarelancaster.com.au to find out more or follow her on Twitter.

TODAY’S TASK
Generating a new lead can be as simple as picking up some new followers on Twitter. The key (with leads of any type) is that they be relevant and possible clients. If there is a higher than 0% chance that they may be interested in your products or services, then they are a valuable lead.

What is your area of thought leadership? Post a Tweet today providing valuable content (a link to a newsletter, an article on your website, some information that tells people what you do) and offer people an opportunity to find out more about you.

Suzi’s Note: Leads are people too
Generating leads is only one part of the sales equation. Having umpteen followers and a database of thousands is only valuable if you can continue to build value into the relationships in order to, at some point, have some financial exchange with that lead (either directly or indirectly). Remember leads are people, not just names.