Too many people underestimate the power of social media for lead generation.
It’s right in front of them, but they don’t see it.
According to GlobalWebIndex, 30% of the time spent online is accrued to social media, which means that social media interactions account for a third of our daily internet activities.
What does this mean for you as a business?
There’s a huge market opportunity on social media for businesses to thrive on, and some businesses have realized that.
In fact, in 2015, LinkedIn revealed that 81% of SMEs have already deplored social media marketing to drive traffic.
But getting top lead from social media means more than just posting cute videos and photos of babies and kittens.
If you can, take a deep dive into your social metrics to know your numbers and see if you can take your engagement up by a few notches, you’d be surprised at how much it can impact the lead generation of your business.
Here are some pointers to nudge you in the right direction:
1. Take advantage of social proof
Have you heard about the crowd effect?
It is when people assume that some individuals are experts on a subject or situation because of the number of people that seem to be following them.
It happens to work for a lot of businesses.
Take a look at the McDonald’s restaurant sign, for example, it reads “over 99 billion served”, and 99 billion people are a lot of people.
And I’m guessing if you ever found yourself hungry, and you haven’t known about McDonald previously, but you see the sign, you’d think they must be serving great food to have gotten that number of customers.
It works the same way on social media.
When businesses want to convince you to follow them on social media, they show you that other people do too, which makes you think that they must be doing something right.
Make your customers stick to you. They are likely to follow you everywhere, even on social media. Needless to say, a good number of followers make others believe you are here for some serious business.
And this is just one of the ways businesses increase their brand’s influence with social proof.
According to NixonMcInnes, there are 5 types of social proof.
Image Source: Pinterest
For example, Alexa makes use of a quote from Linux Academy marketing director, Colette Wladyka, to establish confidence in their product.
Image Source: Alexa
And, Oberlo leverages individuals’ story of their experiences on their website.
Image Source: Oberlo
Influencer marketing for example, works on the same principle. The only difference here is that you don’t pay experts to vouch for you, rather you build up on your social rapport to become an influencer yourself. How to become an influencer isn’t something that can’t be decoded these days.
2. Introduce happiness in your headlines
Emotions such as happiness, fear, anger, and sadness almost always provoke a response, even on social media.
Image Source: CoSchedule
But the most contagious of the four is happiness, and you can use it to your advantage.
According to statistics, positive posts on social media influence 1.75 more responses.
Knowing this, coupled with introducing frequency illusion, that is, passing positive messages about your brand among your audience, will improve brand trust.
Do you get the picture?
What you need to do as a brand is to consistently pass positive messages across to your prospect. Once frequency illusion kicks in, you’ll have made a fan for the most part of your business life.
Check out: 16 Powerful Tips to Increase Instagram Engagement in 2019
3. Make your prospects fear to miss out
It happens to the best of us.
One minute you are passing up a chance to hang out with the guys for the weekend because you have been working all week, the next minute you’re regretting not going when you scroll through their photos.
You can use this to win more leads for your business.
It is called the fear of missing out (FOMO).
If you ever found yourself reluctant to turn off your phone so that you don’t miss out on an important update, then you know what I’m talking about.
In fact, more than half of social media users suffer from FOMO.
Image Source: Skyworld
But how can you use this to your advantage?
You can use click baits to grab prospects’ attention.
Mind you, there’s a fine line between using click baits and lying.
Click baits basically mean using very smart headlines, and at the end of the day, you can fulfill what you promised.
Lying is lying; plain and simple.
A typical example of a company that uses attention-grabbing headlines is BuzzFeed.
While BuzzFeed sometimes gets criticized for some of their over exaggerated headlines, it seems to be working very well for them. About 42% of all their traffic comes from social sites.
4. Provoke curiosity
Curiosity may kill the cat, but on social media, it’s a frigging goldmine for marketers.
Think about it:
It’s embedded in our nature to want to know how things work and understand why they even exist. That’s why your opportunity lies.
By presenting just enough information to tease your prospects, you will pique their desire to fill their curiosity gap, which will cause them to click on your post or whatever resources you want them directed to.
If you want to go all the way, you can be proactive and search for answers to issues that are likely to plague your audience.
There is an abundance of such questions on Quora.
Image Source: Quora
When you are creating your content and resources, be sure to use trigger words like How to, what, when, etc.
Image Source: Neil Patel
5. Please it about your audience
Do you feel inclined to return a favor to someone who has helped you out in the past before?
Well, you are not alone. It is called the principle of reciprocity, which means that people respond well to nice gestures.
To apply this to business, try to make your audience feel special by surprising them with gifts and discounts.
An example of where this strategy worked is in the Shane Bennett and Samsung story.
Shane, who had been a loyal customer of Samsung, went on social media to request for a free smartphone in a very unique way.
Image Source: Buffer
Guess what:
Samsung found him out, sent him the phone also in a unique way, and the story went viral, earning Samsung tremendous media coverage and new customers.
Image Source: Buffer
Last words
Social engagement provides a brilliant way to reach more people and boost your brand reputation. But fluffs and spam won’t cut it. Your message needs to stand out in order to press the right buttons among your audience. Start by implementing the above hacks one by one, and your leads will multiply in no time.
For more, check out these 7 Foolproof Methods for Increasing Social Media Engagement.
Roberto Garvin
Co-Founder of Mofluid
I am Roberto, co-founder of Mofluid. It is absolutely amazing to see how technology continues to evolve, from email to browsers, search engines, mobile, AI and now blockchain. I am fortunate to witness it all. Really excited to see what’s next.