Many of us tap into the millions of reviews and comments on social media to find influencers, resolve customer complaints, buzz monitoring and the like. But one use that is often overlooked is the hunt for prospects.

Using social lead generation or listening tools, you can find the exact kind of people that might be interested in purchasing your products. And not just masses of unqualified leads, but real leads with real needs.

Being able to demonstrate a gap in the market, or a bigger audience to reach out to, especially those that your managers weren’t aware of, could point out a massive growth opportunity for your business or help your agency secure that valuable pitch.

If you’re unconvinced by the potential power of social lead generation, then consider these 3 facts:

1/ Clarifying the buying cycle

What makes social media so powerful for lead generation?

The ability to have direct conversations with your most valued audiences and aligning these interactions to the appropriate stages of prospects’ buying cycle.

To achieve this, marketers must listen to their stakeholders online to understand where they are in the buying cycle and how they want to progress through it.

Say you’re a company that makes high-end video production equipment for the entertainment industry, you will first need to find out the specifics of your target audience by using a social listening platform to answer the following questions:

  1. Who is your target audience? Engineers and video editors at large Hollywood studios as well as executives at small, medium, and large video production agencies around the world.
  2. Where are they in the social realm? Top sites are a Linkedin user group for video production tools, Twitter, and a video production community forum.
  3. What keywords do they use to discuss products/services related to our products? “CGI,” “animations,” “cool camera shot,” “avid,” “high-end video”
  4. What keywords do they use when discussing their challenges that your products solve? “video format conversion,” “slow composer,” “slow rendering”
  5. What needs do they express? Flexibility to film once for different audiences (TV, web, mobile devices, etc.), speed, high-performance, quality, superiority
  6. Other discoveries? Price is not an important factor, as these people are judged by making the best video possible.

Having this profile information in hand will help you add specificity to your social lead generation campaigns and tactics. We’ve set up queries in Brandwatch to obtain this information and find leads every day.

In this example, you could rule out a campaign with a discount offer. After all, your target audience has shown that it is willing to pay full price for the highest-quality and fastest tool possible.

2/ Uncovering the golden nugget

Knowing this, your team will need to query social sites for one simple piece of prospect data: is your audience asking basic questions or advanced questions?

For the marketing team, the answer would help determine how they would develop new marketing materials and social conversations (e.g. content meant to educate early-stage prospects or hit them with the hard-sell vendor comparison content?).

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3/ Measurement to make social lead generation a success

Some marketers are successfully generating leads on social and don’t even know it. How is that possible?

Many of them measure social media leads the same way they measure leads from traditional marketing approaches.

But what if, for instance, your social media efforts drove twice as many registrants to your event? Most marketers would see this as a huge success, but it may not necessarily drive new prospects into the sales cycle.

To overcome this gap, you will need to define specific social media goals to measure success as they relate to leads (e.g. number of content downloads or registrants making a purchase within 6 months after attending the event).

4/ Nurture your leads before passing them to sales

A sales cycle of four months or longer is common for most B2B companies. Prospects spend a lot of time doing independent research on social during that time. Marketers who engage with them on social are often tempted to pass them on to sales as fast as possible in order to show social lead generation success.

Don’t do it!

The majority of prospects prefer to engage a salesperson much later in the process. In fact, today’s B2B buyers complete at least 70% of their purchase before contacting a sales representative.

Use the knowledge you’ve picked up from social listening to elevate the most relevant prospects.

For example, you could obtain great lead-qualifying insights by cross-referencing them with their information on Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks. Connect with them, find what it is they need, track their responsiveness over time and then pass the most valuable ones to your sales teams at the appropriate state to ensure a higher close rate.

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5/ Closing the loop

As social media budgets continue to grow, along with management expectations management, marketers will need to concretely measure and benchmark their social lead generation efforts. Below are some measures that you should easily perform with your social listening tool

  • volume of mentions of your brand
  • improvement in brand sentiment ratings
  • website traffic
  • volume of visits from specific sites
  • number of new fans and followers
  • number of new social media sites that mention your brand

By combining this info with your traditional data, such as content downloads, submitted lead forms, etc. it should be much easier for you to prove the success of your social lead generation efforts.

By downloading this free guide you will learn how to reach a bigger audience, use your social listening tool in the sales process and drive your contacts into your sales cycle. After reading, you’ll be better equipped for the next generation of social media marketing.