How your business can use social media to generate leads.

Leads are essential to the growth of your business, and your marketing strategy is built around finding and connecting with leads. So when 92% of all marketers indicate that their social media efforts have generated more exposure for their businesses, you should take note and make social media part of your prospecting strategy.

Building a network of online connections is an effective way to find new leads. And with social media, you can find new leads by doing something called social prospecting. Social prospecting is the art of searching the social web, identifying potential prospects for your business, and engaging them in a manner that draws them to your company’s website and through your funnel. At the core, social prospecting is about listening. It’s about listening to social media conversations in order to generate leads for your business. It goes beyond monitoring keywords to engaging people that may or may not know what your business can do for them.

As you build your social prospecting strategy and develop new approaches to connect with leads, keep these 25 handy tips close by to guide your efforts.

Twitter

1. Post content that draws prospects back to your website.
2. Aim to share useful content on Twitter two to three times per week.
3. Make customers feel appreciated by prioritizing their questions.
4. Keep prospects engaged by retweeting some of their organic content.
5. Favorite tweets with content that leads share.
6. Respond to and offer help to industry peers’ questions.
7. Delight customers by replying or favoriting tweets when they mention your company.
8. Engage with potential prospects by offering help using relevant content.

LinkedIn

9. Post at least twice a week to your company’s LinkedIn page.
10. Join five LinkedIn Groups that could connect you with potential prospects.
11. Join conversations in the group where you can add value with your content.
12. “Like” content that others are sharing in the group.
13. Share your own content to the group.
14. Use LinkedIn Answers to respond to questions posted by others in your industry.
15. Make a habit of routinely reviewing the content posted within your groups.
16. Comment and add value to posts from others in the group.
17. Ask for an offline meeting with your most engaged prospects.

Facebook

18. Link to your blog from Facebook.
19. Add calls to action to posts.
20. Promote a special product or service offer solely for Facebook fans.
21. Create and post visual content, like infographics and videos.
22. Share a quote or industry statistic with your fans.
23. To draw more comments from fans, pose a question.
24. Create a Facebook event to promote trade show appearances or webinars.
25. Update your company’s profile and cover photos routinely.

Ready to build a more full-bodied social prospecting strategy? We’ve laid out the quickest ways for you to find more leads and prospects on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ in our social prospecting workbook. In a dedicated worksheet to each of those social media platforms, you’ll find every worksheet includes: a 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; and take-home exercises for follow-up prospecting. To get started growing your prospecting opportunities and building alternative lead generation and nurturing strategies, download our free workbook.

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