Social media can be one of the most authentic ways to connect with qualified sales leads. Once you figure out how to generate leads using social media, you can work with these new leads to generate more sales for your business.

One of the biggest advantages of using social media to generate leads is that social media makes it easier for for people to share your messages with their friends. Even if you don’t collect information about the first person to see your post, but they share your post with their friends and family, you have gotten a subtle (yet powerful) peer-to-peer endorsement of your brand.

These are the five things that you will need to do to generate leads using social media:

1. Find and captivate your target audience online.

2. Find useful content online and promote it.

3. Find ways to collect information about your leads.

4. Find ways to analyze your leads.

5. Get in touch with your leads.

Let’s dig deeper into each of these 5 social media lead generation maneuvers.

1. Find and captivate your target audience online.

Companies often try to spread their messages to everybody possible. This is a mistake, and focusing intensely on a single target audience will yield the best results. A lot of companies make this mistake because they are too eager to try to hit “unicorn” status. Being focused will allow you to be more persistent, consistent, and find opportunities to hone in your your messaging.

To decide who to focus on, you need to find who your target audience is and decide how you can best speak to them. Once you know who your target audience is and how to speak to them, you know how to connect with the people who matter most to your business using social media.

2. Find useful content online and promote it.

Creating your own content that your target audience will enjoy is a brilliant way to grow your social media in a powerful way. Share useful tips and news that your target audience will enjoy, and this will drive traffic back to your website. You can share tips and news as blog posts on your site, ebooks, or by building an email list on your website.

However, not everybody has time to make original content. This is OK. Even sharing content hosted elsewhere, that is relevant to your target audience, will strengthen your brand and grow your brand audience.

3. Find ways to collect information about your leads.When a person visits your website, you want to collect information about them. You typically do this using strategically placed forms, but can learn even more about your website visitors by using a tool like LeadBoxer.A great way to attract new and qualified leads to your websites is using social media and content that you’re creating or sharing. Finding ways to collect information about your leads and website visitors is vital for receiving a positive return on your social media investment.4. Find ways to analyze your leads.Once you’ve began collecting leads using social media, you’ll need to find way to analyze your leads. Once again, LeadBoxer is a great solution for accomplishing this. By using a tool like LeadBoxer, you’ll be able to understand detailed information about your leads, such as: name, company, company size, LinkedIn profiles, and much more.5. Get in touch with your leads.

This is the step where everything comes together. Now that you’ve collected leads using social media and learned about your leads, you’re ready to contact them. Use what you know about your leads and what you think they know about your brand to craft strong and convincing messaging.

Conclusion

Lead generation using social media may sound somewhat daunting at first, but we promise that it’s really not too bad. When you combine your social media efforts with a powerful tool like LeadBoxer, you’ll capture more leads and close more (and bigger!) deals.