Social prospecting helps you identify potential customers outside your established audience using social platforms.

Social media should be an integral part of your marketing strategy — we know it helps build brand reputation, gather market intelligence, discover customer problems, and influence purchasing decisions. But your lead generation efforts should also include the use of social platforms. It’s a practice called social prospecting that can be highly effective in identifying new prospects.

How does social prospecting work?

You’ll use your existing social handles to identify and pursue potential customers that may be interested in your business but that don’t yet know about it. HubSpot describes social prospecting: “It’s about scouring the social web, identifying potential prospects, and engaging them through content to get them to your site and move them through your funnel.”

Why does it work?

Think about the size of your established audience. Now think about the total number of active users on social media: As of the fourth quarter of 2015,  Facebook had 1.59 billion active monthly users, Twitter averaged at 305 million, LinkedIn had 414 million, Google+ had 111 million, and Pinterest had more than 100 million. Those enormous numbers equal enormous potential for your business.

That’s because social media isn’t just for recreational purposes anymore. More than half (53%) of B2B buyers report using social media to research purchases, in fact. Social prospecting allows you to be proactive in finding all of the considerable number of social-media-using prospects who are looking for you, too.

How do you get started?

If you already have a social media presence, that’s step one. It gets a little more complicated from there.

Fronetics has developed a free social prospecting workbook to learn how to use social listening to generate new leads for your business. We’ve identified the quickest way to find potential customers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. Every worksheet includes:

• Short preparatory work to make the actual prospecting easy
• Visual instructions on how and where to find prospects
• Pro tips that will help you get the best results
• Prescriptions (Marketing Rx) for success
• Take-home exercises for follow-up prospecting

Happy prospecting!

Related articles:

• 25 Ways to Generate More Leads Using Social Media
• How Your Business Can Use Social Media to Find New Leads
• How to Use LinkedIn Groups to Increase Sales Leads