A Beginner’s Guide to Lead Conversion with Social Media

By Sean Work

So, you’ve been publishing on Facebook, Twitter and maybe a few other social media platforms, and you’ve built up a decent following in each channel. Your audience is starting to engage more and more with your content.

Maybe you’re wondering, “Okay, what’s next? How can I take this to the next level? How can I use social media to drive leads for my business?”

Done right, social media can be an extremely powerful tool for lead generation, but getting there takes time, patience, a lot of testing and the dedication to post highly-valuable content for your audience.

This guide focuses on how to generate leads with non-paid content in social media. Social ads are also an excellent for leads, and maybe it’s something I’ll talk about in a future post. For now, we’ll learn how to create content for Facebook and Twitter that inspires clicks and conversions, and how to measure the results of your social lead gen efforts so that you can show your boss just how valuable social media can be for your business.

Here we go.

Optimize How You Link to Your External Content

In order to be effective at generating leads with social media you need to treat it as a key part of your overall content marketing machine. This means that social media becomes a place where you distribute high-value content to your audience––content found on your blog, the resources section of your site or on landing pages.

But it’s not just about the value of the content you’re linking to; what really counts is how you format the posts in each channel.

Before diving into how to optimize your posts for lead generation, let’s take a look at three possible lead generation paths for social:

1. Social channel > Blog post with link to a relevant landing page (gated content) > lead
2. Social channel > …read more