Tips & Tactics

With more than 750 million global users on Facebook and 460,000 new Twitter accounts added each day, your current and potential customers are very likely using social media. There’s a strong possibility they are talking about your industry – or your brand – right now. What’s more: Tweets and Facebook posts are indexed by search engines like Google. If you invest time to monitor conversations and create content that relates to the discussions you find, you'll not only reap the immediate community engagement benefits of this activity, you will also see the search engine optimization advantages from your evergreen content. As you can imagine, the lead generation possibilities in social media are innumerable. No matter what platform you’re engaging on or monitoring, generating leads from social media happens in this process:

• Listen: Identify existing conversations pertaining to your brand
• Engage and Create Content: Generate Traffic to Content‹
• Analyze and Measure: Let’s break it down a little more

Listening: Identify the existing conversations pertaining to your brand

First and foremost, learn what your customers, your competitor’s customers and those discussing topics associated with your industry are saying. This requires a daily check-up of such conversations on each social media platform. Filter through the masses of content by setting up keyword searches for your brand, your main competitors and key topics related to your industry.

Platforms like Twitter are particularly conversational, so select keywords that tap into the language real people use using competitor brand names and terms of sentiment like “love,” “hate,” etc. and save these searches as streams in your HootSuite dashboard so you and your team can efficiently monitor the very real view of people's questions and opinions.

Create Content and Engage

When you identify the conversations pertaining to your industry, brand and competitors, you want to react in two ways:

1. Create content that answers the questions you see and relates to the conversations you find
2. Engage directly in the conversations

Use the knowledge you glean from listening to conversations on social media as ideas for content. Answer common questions by prompting discussions or creating blog articles. Then, elaborate on common themes in more extensive pieces of content like eBooks, webinars or how to video series.

When you create content that answers questions, you have something valuable to offer the conversation. This draws in more qualified prospects who use search engines to find answers and information that can be provided by your content and website.

Generate Tra!c to Content

1. Optimize content for SEO

Optimise for both on-page and off-page search engine optimisation. For onpage SEO, optimise each blog posts' page titles, meta tags and headlines forthe keywords that matter to your business. You can use a free tool like Google Adwords’ keyword research tool to research popular keywords and variations of those phrases to get a sense of what you want to rank for. Off-page SEO means generating inbound links to your content. Commenting and guest posting on other blogs relevant to your business are just a few ways youcan generate inbound links.

2. Share Content on Social Channels

Have a great blog post? No one will know about it if you don’t spread the word. In addition to having an editorial calendar for your blog, you want to have a content publishing schedule to promote your content. Each day, plan how you will share your content on your social channels. HootSuite’s Publisher tool allows you to schedule, view and edit all of your updates in advance.

But don't stop there: Don't be afraid that you'll flood your followers with the same messages if you Tweet content more than once a day. In fact, that’s a good thing, as not every follower lives in your time zone. So long as you vary the message, you can share the same content a few times in order to gain maximum exposure.

3. Analyze and Measure

Generating leads, afterall, is just the first step. Analyze what content, traffic sources and social media channels produce the most page views. Consider what soures, content and keywords bring visitors that convert to leads. leads. Identify the paths people take to conversion, then, use that information to connect your social media lead generation to your lead nuturing and marketing automation efforts, personalising your communications at each step of the funnel and helping you close more sales.

The next section delves into the metrics of social that you can use to take granular stats, such as Likes, retweets, +1s etc. and tie them to goals at a higher level.

The Metrics that Matter

The challenge with social media measurement is that many rely on social-specific statistics that vary by individual network, i.e.: Likes, RTs, followers, etc. Viewed alone, these measurements don’t show the true value social media provides to the bottom line and need to be aligned with greater metrics. As businesses strive to track how tweets turn into transactions, it’s important to understand how to measure lead generation. This is isn’t simply A turns into B but rather, the lead generation cycle starts with a conversation and moves down a path:‹

• Engagement
• Opportunity
• Conversion

As a starting point, lead generation can be viewed as an indication of audience participation with your social messaging. By understanding this top level engagement, you’ll be able to improve the return on your investment by adjusting your messaging and campaigns based on audience activities.

Engagement

At the top level, measuring participation will show how successful your messaging is at driving your audience down the sales funnel towards being a lead ready to covert. This measurement counts any actions that your audience takes, including:

• ReTweets, @replies, shares – These gestures on Twitter show that your content resonated with the audience, and they were inspired to share, ask a question or associate themselves with your brand.
• Likes, +1s, comments, mentions, wall posts – Likes on Facebook posts are good and comments on your Facebook Page are even better. These actions are then broadcast to their friends which gives you a chance to reach out, reply and build audience.
• Click-throughs Conversions don't happen on Twitter or Facebook per se, but clicks from social channels to your landing pages, e-commerce store, careers page, helpd desk, order page etc. indicate that your content was interesting and relevant to your audience and resulted in them moving further down the sales funnel into opportunity.

Conversion

Finally, the last stage of the lead gen metrics is conversion, which defines how successful your actions are and allows you to tie social media details like tweets and Facebook posts into real dollars. Depending on your business and campaigns, track questions like: Did they redeem a coupon from Foursquare? Did they sign up to your program when they clicked on a Twitter link? Did they buy the product you posted on your Facebook page? Did they add-on to their purchase? If yes, what demographic do they fit into? Be sure to compare the average cost of purchases/units made by customers originating from social media channels with customers from other channels. You'll likely plot out a clear graph of profitability by identifying patterns.

Set Goals, Test and Measure

Remember, each business and brand has unique problems to solve and established channels. Rather than measuring your campaigns by traditional metrics, work back from your ultimate goal – whether it be to increase resume submissions or increase purchases – and ask the questions which help you to understand your audience origins and motivations. Since you measure most every action from your social media-centric campaigns, this is a great chance to experiment with your messaging, including tone, voice, offers, photos and time of day. Try different tactics, measure everything, then adjust and you'll watch your charts go up and to the right.