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My social media feeds are full of people looking for things. This morning, a friend of mine who is a parent of young toddlers posted a desperate plea on Facebook for a recommendation for a maid service. Another was travelling to China on business and was seeking a reliable VPN service to bypass the Great Firewall while there. A third Tweeted that he’s looking for a freelance translator for a project. And this was all before 9a.m.<\/p>\n
Social media is a veritable gold mine of leads. And more businesses than ever are recognizing its value. A recent study by MECLABS found that 72% of companies are using social media to generate leads<\/a>. They’re increasing their social media budgets; they’re on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn; they’re socially plugged in. And it’s paying dividends.\u00a0 Traditional methods of lead generation involve going out into the world to find and chase down leads. Social media is all about helping those leads find you. This is a big paradigm shift for many companies accustomed to an outbound sales mentality, and sometimes that culture shift is the biggest challenge. Every sales organization in history understands that inbound leads cost less than outbound leads, but not everyone is adept at finding them. Digital marketing has usually been designed to drive people to a website — via SEO<\/a>, paid search<\/a>, banner advertising or content syndication. Successful lead generation via social media may bypass your website altogether, and that’s perfectly fine, so long as it’s driving people to take action — to call, email, visit or otherwise contact your business. In other words, social lead generation requires less focus on bringing people to you, and more focus on going out to them.<\/p>\n Where the leads are<\/strong><\/p>\n So where are these leads, exactly? It varies from business to business, which is why it’s not enough to throw up a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. It starts by understanding where the audience is and where they’re most open to being reached. Emerging channels are in some cases generating more leads than larger, more established channels. For instance, a study earlier this year by Shareaholic found that plucky little Pinterest<\/a> has moved beyond recipes and photos of cats to generate more leads than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn <\/a>combined<\/a>. <\/em>\n \n Get exclusive insights into digital
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\nA paradigm shift<\/strong><\/p>\n\n \n \n Stay Forward <\/h2>\n
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