What Does A Lead Mean In Social Media? Definition and Guide

Today, almost 55 percent of internet users are on social media. They use it on a daily basis providing massive amounts of data to the platforms. This data is valuable for SEO and social media lead generation. The marketers can use it to target their audience directly.

What Is a lead?

Lead is the word which we use in order to refer to a person who seemingly is interested in what we offer and who has provided us information, so we can contact her/him directly. The goal is to obtain the information of the users in order to create our own database. The information that we can require might be:

the name
e-mail or
telephone or mobile number,

but this is just an idea, and you should be able to identify the most relevant information for you.

A lead defined as a “cold contact” with a person who is interested in what we offer. As a result of this, she/he has provided the information required to contact her/him. One of the most used strategies to get leads is to generate interesting content, targeted to the specific public you want to reach, allowing them to download it through different landing pages. Another one is to make contests, drawings or quizzes where, as a requirement to take part, users should facilitate some required information.

What Is Social Media Lead Generation?

Social media lead generation is all about implementing strategic marketing tactics specially designed for capturing qualified leads and pulling them into your sales funnel.

Generating sales leads on social media helps businesses to identify people who are interested in them. In addition, these leads act as a bridge to the potential customers to make special offers and convert them as loyal customers.

Here are the key objectives of how businesses use social media as part of their lead generation process.

Increase brand awareness: There will be 3.02 billion social media users worldwide by 2021. In conclusion With more & more people taking to social media to research and sound off on brands, getting your target audience’s attention is easier to create brand awareness.

Reach out to new customers: The best way to build an active audience on social media is to focus on the people who already know you best. For example by sharing relevant content, promptly interacting with them, and acknowledging their feedback, you can expand your audience and strengthen your relationships.

Increase website traffic: The social media sphere is home to more than 3.4 billion active users. Social media is a great source of driving traffic to your website. They bring in ample opportunities to gain business visitors and convert into leads.

Types of Leads

The type of leads depends on their placement in the marketing funnel. There are three main types of marketing lead:

Information qualified lead (IQL). These leads are at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. Therefore, a company should offer helpful information about a topic relevant to the person’s query in exchange for personal data like their name, email address, location, etc. This type of marketing lead is also called a “cold lead.”
Marketing qualified lead (MQL). These leads are in the middle of the sales funnel. They have expressed continuing interest in a company. After the prospects identify the problem, they typically look for the way a company can handle it. Also they say “warm lead” to this type of lead
Sales qualified lead (SQL). This lead is at the bottom of the funnel; they express their willingness to make a purchase. It is also called a “hot lead.”

Five Ways That You Can Generate Leads On Social Media:

1. Run Social Media Paid Ads For Generating Leads

Businesses that run paid ads campaigns encounter benefits such as reaching out to the exact audience, increased engagement, fan growth, and many more. But what about paid social media advertising strategy?

Running paid social media ads involves:

capturing the right data,
getting vital insights,
and using them

to make your paid social media more powerful and effective than ever. If done in the right way, it acts as a great social media lead gen tool by saving business time and costs.

However AdEspresso is a great tool that helps your social media lead generation strategy to rise above the fray.

Some key tips on how to run a successful paid advertising strategy.

Define your paid social media objectives and core KPIs – Is it for increasing brand awareness and start conversations or increase purchases that can be directly attributed to your social efforts.

Connect all your owned ad accounts in one place – One of the core challenges faced by marketers is proving marketing ROI, and to do that, they need to connect data across channels data in one place, then measure & analyze it all together.

2. Refer-a-Friend

This can be tricky, but if you play your cards right, referral campaigns can be a great way to engage your followers. With 92% of buyers trusting the recommendations of their friends and family, referrals are a great way to break the ice with prospects. Create compelling offers for both the referrer and the referees such as gift card or cash incentives. It might be the nudge your customers need to recommend you to their network.

Also a social application that’s integrated with your marketing automation platform, you can easily set up a referral campaign that extends across major social media platforms, allowing you to grow your customer base fast. Since each shared message will include a special link that tracks the responses at every stage to the conversion event, you’ll be able to track the campaign’s progression and effectiveness and understand how prospects are helping to get the word out. Here’s an example of a referral campaign that we ran for our annual event, Marketing Nation Online. Participants were encouraged to refer their friends through social media for a chance to win an Amazon gift card.

3. Automate Your Social Media Lead Generation With Chatbots

Instant messaging & chatbots are in vogue and have become powerful weapons for marketers today. Chatbots allow businesses to connect with their prospects even better than humans can, while at the same time dramatically lowering overhead costs.

You as a business won’t succeed by asking customers to reach out to you, in today’s omni-channel world. Instead, you have to meet them where they already are. 12% of people on the planet use Facebook Messenger in any given month. Hence, it is vital to allow consumers to make purchases without leaving the app.

When customers ask for information about credit cards, the chatbot pulls options from Omega Bank’s website for them to browse. If they come across a product that interests them, they can click for more details or choose to browse a more targeted list. For example, when clicked “See more like this,” the chatbot displays other Omega credit cards that offer rewards.

Here is how chatbots act as the best social media lead generation tools.

Also with AI bots, businesses can serve up predefined responses to customer queries across social platforms.

Bots can decipher the intent of your visitors. If you know the intent, you know what will be your next action, which acts as the secret sauce of lead nurturing.

Chatbots can use the previous interaction history to develop a specific profile of each customer, allowing them to deliver personalized messages, content, and product suggestions.

4. Host a Tweet Chat or Live Stream

Having an Instagram live is a great way to directly interact with your followers and engage with them in real-time. By answering questions, gathering feedback, and generating awareness about your products or services, live chats give you the opportunity to position your brand as an expert in the industry. You can also drive cross-channel traffic by directing participants to branded content, landing pages, and offerings.

With Twitter’s new Moments, you’ll have this capability directly within the platform.

5. Generate Leads From Your Blog

Try blogging. Write interesting articles for beginners, with links to your products. Optimize and promote them, add cases about your company helping to solve other’s problems.

Other terms that you must know

You already know about one of the most used terms in the world of digital marketing: the fan concept. When a person decides to follow the profile of another person, brand or service in Social Media, this person becomes a fan.

The objective of every brand is to turn its clients into fans in order to improve its online reputation. Fans are not just a number. To build a good and lasting relationship with our fans we must focus on every target and channel.

The customer is the final client who purchases a product or service and is really satisfied with it. It contributes a great benefit since it puts into practice the called “mouth-to-mouth”, that is, the customer recommends our product to her/his friends and best-known people.