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Using Social Media for Lead Generation

Guest post by: michelle crossley

Article Overview: Is your blog generating leads yet? If not, then you need to use social media to generate leads. How can you use social media to attract prospects to your business? Assuming you’re offering a quality services or product, a convincing offer, and are talking to the right customer, social media tools make generating leads easy on the pocket and time-efficient.

Using Social Media for Lead Generation

Twitter as a Lead Generation Tool

Having thousands of followers and a database of millions 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. The first strategy is to schedule tweets for times that many people read Twitter, usually on weekdays. You can use tools like Hootsuite to do the actual scheduling. Second, send out a promotional tweet every day, but with an altered text. Different people respond to different call-to-actions. If you want to reach people who don't follow you, include relevant keywords or hashtags. Experienced Twitter users will search for those terms. Join LinkedIn Communities to Get Noticed

Social media is organized around common interests. As an individual you can connect with professional contacts on LinkedIn. If you want to influence these online communities for your business, you need to be a valued community member too. The easiest way to become valued is to present some new insight. Update your LinkedIn status frequently. These status updates are shown on your profile and emailed to everyone in your network. To reach new people, post your message in LinkedIn Groups. Ask questions to seek feedback on your content; don't forget to include a link to the registration page. Link your profile to your website, blog and feed. Incorporate the linked in tool that displays your feed on your profile as well. And if you're answering other questions, use an autograph that promotes your brand. LinkedIn works two ways for lead generation. It helps you find out what is interesting for your audience and to promote your offers.

Blogging

Regularly updating your blog will interest possible clients. You'll expand your readership by publishing articles regularly, and by having a common theme in all the posts. Once you have a loyal audience, write a blog post about your new content, with a link to the registration page. This call to action does magic for lead generation. You will get lots of registrations from your blog readers.

Create a Facebook Application to Promote Your Brand

The Facebook market is particularly valuable for those businesses that sell material products. If you run an ecommerce store, you can promote your items for free giving you greater exposure and potentially improving your sales figures and profit levels. By creating a Facebook application you promote your business in several ways. First, other users will be more inclined to add you as a friend if your application is useful. They may also send details of your application to their own network - this style of viral marketing can generate a lot of interest for very little money. Users will remember your name, the name of your service, and they will instinctively know how to find you.

Also, add links to your website and blog on your home page profile under your photo as well as on your information page. Setup the RSS Feed feature to display your feed on your profile. This will auto display on everyone's news feed!

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

3 Ways Social Media Helps Generate Leads

By Building 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.

By Building Relationships

Social networking online allows you to build solid relationships that can result in lead generation for your business. Talking to people in complimentary industries, helping them with client enquiries can help you build a strategic partnership. Building relationships with individuals and proving them with information they need could return media opportunities to promote your business.

Must Do's to Attract Visitors

There's a variety of ways to use social networking to attract visitors to your website.

Use social networks to distribute your content by posting a link to your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube or your blog profile and adding content distribution buttons to your web page (e.g. Tweetmeme, Digg and RSS). 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.

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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Article Tags: Social Media for Lead Generation



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