Using Social Media to Drive High-Yield Lead Generation

Is Facebook making us lonely?

Thankfully, we won’t bother to answer that much-debated and highly-academic question.  Rather, we’d like to touch on how social media is upending or reenergizing foundational aspects of running a business.

Take lead generation, for example.  Generating solid leads that can lead to high-percentage conversions is the “secret sauce” of business schools, marketers, and anyone looking to grow their business.  It should also be the cornerstone of any small business support strategy.

And there was a time in the not-so-distant past (say, seven years ago), when lead generation involved administrative assistants or marketing analysts toiling through paid services like Hoover’s, scouring the Internet – even flipping through the phonebook.

Social media, and most notably LinkedIn, has changed that.  Now would-be customers voluntarily offer facts, demographic items, and other juicy tidbits that you used to pay for: location, gender, interests, and perhaps most importantly, their title, which can make it pretty easy to quickly find a key “decision-maker.”

Tags | facebook, inbound marketing, lead generation, small business support, social media