What’s the most essential goal of social media in a B2B context?

I would say lead generation. In today’s financial scenario, getting in touch with prospective customers is the lifeblood of any organization. But how can you leverage social media to get more leads without shouting your announcements blatantly and ruining your online reputation?

Here are top B2B lead generation strategies, which you should follow.

Join a community

Social media is a broad platform where people are organized and gathered according to common interests. As a professional you can connect with other professionals on LinkedIn; on Twitter, you follow individuals with similar interests. If you want to leverage the online communities for growing your business, you will need to be valued as a community member. An easy way to become valued is to present a few insights and become known as an industry and community expert.

Content

First figure out what it is that interests your target audience. Spend some time in order to become a member of a social media community. Listen, ask questions and then develop content: an e-book, blogs, tips, an online event, a trial version of a tool, or whatever interests your target group. Since your aim is to generate social sales leads, you must make content very alluring so that people respond to your calls to action.

Action!

Now you are aware of the relevant communities and have created something which they are looking for, start to use social media to promote your content. What is the kind of results, which you can expect? You may have even a 400 % increase in your conversions by making use of social media.

A marketing automation company experienced highly qualified leads from social media with 24% converting to sales opportunities. Let us zoom in on what you may do for lead generation via Twitter and blogging.

Twitter

This social media platform is becoming more popular day by day. That’s both a curse as well as blessing.

It is great that the audience is growing but the average Twitter user has a difficult time reading all those tweets, so you have to do a lot of tweets to get your message to your target audience.

Schedule tweets when most people from your target market are active on Twitter, usually on weekdays and during office house. You can use tools like Odimax to establish these peak times and do the scheduling. You can also send promotional tweets, optimized with different content and calls-to-action. If you wish to reach people who do not follow you, use hash tags or relevant keywords which they may be searching for. Experienced Twitter users generally look for those terms.

A popular call to action is to encourage re tweets, which will get your message spread further to the audiences of your followers. Firstly, you mustn’t use the full 140 characters because your own Twitter handle will be included in the re tweet as well. Aim to use up to 120 characters, as this will leave users space to share your posts without losing content. If any of your coworkers or friends are Twitter users,ensure they re tweet corporate tweets but do this on a sporadic basis. You should also re tweet what they tweet as well.

By building your following on Twitter and using these strategies, you will drive more traffic to your pages. This will result in increasing the number of your leads.

Blogging

Your blog should be about the topics which interest your prospective clients. You can gain steady readership by posting blogs regularly. Your call to action should always be clear and it must be included at the bottom of your blog posts. Since your blog readers are curious in what you do, a clear and simple call to action will do magic for generating leads.