If you’re a business with an online presence, you probably have social media accounts.

If you’re like a lot of businesses who are trying to use social media to expand their reach online, you may be somewhat aimlessly posting and hoping that you’ll ultimately generate more sales from your efforts.

Instead of guessing if your social media efforts are making sales happen, you can use different ways to generate leads using social media.

You can generate leads using social media in a very cost efficient way if you focus correctly. This means that your efforts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are probably a good start. However, you need to figure out how to become part of the conversation so that your target audience sees what you’re writing. Once your qualified social media view or engagement happens, it’s up to you to then figure out how to turn them into a qualified sales lead.

In this post, we are going to examine 4 proven ways to generate sales leads using social media for your business.

1. Use a lead pixel.

A lead pixel is a very creative and extremely unintrusive way to collect leads on your website. A lead pixel allows you to collect leads, with no forms or buttons. This means that when you get website traffic from social media, you can see the people and companies that are viewing your website. If you notice that a company or person is looking at your website frequently, you’ll know to reach out to them because they likely enjoy the product or service that you offer. If you’d like to try adding a lead pixel to your website, click here.

2. Promote premium “gated” content.

Promoting premium “gated” content is a very common and effective way to generate leads online. This type of content is content that requires the prospective reader to complete an action to gain access. Most frequently, this means providing contact details to receive the asset.

The best way for you to combine gated content with social media is to create ads on Facebook or Twitter that promote content like an ebook or white paper. Once a person clicks on your Facebook post or Tweet, they end up on a landing page that requires him or her to provide you with information before they are able to access the content that enticed them to visit your website.

With this tactic, it’s extra important to make sure that the content people are receiving from you is very high quality. The reader is likely meeting your brand for the first time with this content, and when they are giving you their contact information for this content they likely know they’re going to be targeted by your sales efforts. You don’t want people to have a bad first impression of your brand because it will destroy any chance you have of evolving this newly formed professional relationship.

3. Giveaways work insanely well!

Launching giveaways that your target audience will enjoy is a brilliant tactic for gaining their attention and also collecting their contact information. When you create a giveaway, you can engage your potential prospect in an enjoyable and memorable way since you’re incentivizing them to interact with your brand.

We’ve used the tool Rafflecopter to launch giveaways and can’t recommend it enough. With Rafflecopter, you can quickly gather qualified sales leads by making it easy for people to join your giveaway.

For the prize to offer, we suggest you try giving away things like free premium memberships to your product or service. This prize is valuable for your sales team because the leads you’ll collect with this as the prize will primarily be people who are interested in using the premium version of your product (since they’ve expressed interest in using the premium version of it!).

4. Clever social media search targeting.

Being smart about what you post, so that people in specific areas and with specific interests see what you’re talking about is the easiest way to get the audience you value to become aware of your brand. Once this audience is aware of your brand, you can use some of the previous tactics we’ve talked about to generate leads using social media to collect their contact information.

One clever way to target social media search is geotargeting. To geotarget social media search results, you simply have to mention the city or region that you would like to see what you’re writing about. You can do the exact same thing with interests too… be sure to mention target keywords or use relevant hashtags. When you mention an area or interest, people searching social media become much more likely to accidentally discover your brand (and hopefully convert into a customer).

These simple ideas will help you generate leads using social media.