Social media prospecting is the art of searching the social web, identifying potential prospects for your business, and engaging with them to drive them to your site and ultimately convert them into quality leads for your sales team.
Social prospecting, done right, can strengthen your content strategy and help you find the right information to share so you can further delight your current customers and attract new targeted leads. This valuable strategy lets your business better understand your current and potential customers. Also, it provides a more personal way to engage the public and build brand awareness and trust.
Top Tips for Social Prospecting
With so many options to choose from in social media, the first place to start is deciding which social media platforms you want to prospect. Let’s look deeper into one social media prospecting strategy so you can collect content ideas and understand your target audience better.
Listen
So often, we are quick to speak and slow to listen. We’ve got it backward. One of the greatest lessons we can learn in marketing, outlined in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is to seek first to understand and then to be understood. This step goes beyond monitoring what’s happening on your social media accounts. If we truly listen, we will seek to understand our audience, properly engage with them, and add value to their lives.
Listening on social media is about more than replicating the most popular posts on your competitor’s pages. Rather, take the time to read the comments. Is your audience asking questions you can answer? Are they highlighting pain points your products and services address? Can you identify a differential that will better serve your customers? Take copious notes, but do not comment.
Be Prepared
While this is the first and most important motto every Boy Scout learns, it’s also a great marketing tip. Listening is the first step to building a stronger social media strategy. Once you have a long list of questions and comments, you can look for repeating information.
Next, you need to confirm your insights. Search by keyword on each social platform to see what else pulls up in a query. You may discover that your industry jargon has multiple definitions or that your audience uses a language different from your internal team’s.
You’ll also want to consider the cost of industry keywords. Is there an opportunity to leverage paid ads and improve organic visibility? That’s helpful for your content director to know as you prepare for a strategy meeting.
See How Our PPC Strategy Resulted in a 159.5% Lift in Facebook Likes
Take Action
Social media prospecting can initially seem overwhelming, but you can do this! Remember, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” – Lao Tzu. Take action and put your brand out there.
You’ll set yourself up for success by planning and scheduling your social media content upfront. Bring your list of keywords and questions to your content planning meeting and look for opportunities to incorporate the answers to your audience’s questions into your upcoming social marketing.
Your team may discover content gaps based on your insights. For example, let’s say your audience is asking for new ways to use your product. If you don’t have a blog with a list of ideas, now is the time to create one! That blog is easy to repurpose into video content for social media.
Learn More About Social Amplification Here
Avoid These Platform Mistakes
Social media is a helpful tool, but the wrong messaging can turn away your audience as quickly as you attract them.
Mixing Personal and Professional Content
One of the biggest mistakes companies make on social media is treating a personal page like a business page or vice versa. While not impossible, your options are limited if you don’t set up a personal profile when establishing a business page on Facebook and LinkedIn. You don’t need to post on your personal page, but you must separate business and personal.
Overall, it’s important to remember why people use social media. Pushing your products and services to your friend list non-stop is a great way to get your notifications blocked. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever post about your business. Your true friends will want to support you! However, social media is about being social!
For Facebook, your personal page is yours. Post content relevant to your life, and if that includes using the products you sell, then show that. Otherwise, direct people to learn more by following your business page.
On LinkedIn, the division between personal and professional is even more important to consider. In many cases, LinkedIn is an extension of your resume. If you’re griping about your boss, that will be a red flag when other companies consider hiring you.
When curating posts for your business page for LinkedIn and Facebook, remember that this is an extension of your brand, not an extension of your personal page. Be professional and offer helpful information to those who follow you. Above all, it’s vital that your messaging stays focused on your brand and you always align with your company’s messaging guidelines. You want your audience to read and share your posts for the right reasons, not because they are upset with your personal views on a subject unrelated to your company.
B2B Social vs B2C Social Marketing
B2B social media marketing focuses on marketing your business to other companies, whereas B2C strategies market you directly to individual consumers.
Many businesses misunderstand how to leverage business-to-business social media. As a business owner, you may have heard that you should focus on increasing “connections.” The problem is, when you review how many of those connections have ever converted into real leads, the number is typically very low if any at all. You can avoid this time-wasting trap by focusing on the right objective. Remember, more does not always mean better for social media followers.
When using LinkedIn, connecting with others in your industry is the first and best place to start. This platform aims to build relationships across the web to improve your industry. By sharing personalized information about your niche, you will gain the trust of others, which, in the long run, can produce more quality leads than any marketing gimmick.
People use social networks for various reasons, but the highest priority is connecting with others and building relationships. Your brand will build trust by adding value to the conversation and building relationships that give rather than take.
Trust will open the door to many opportunities and allow your business to flourish online like never before. If used correctly over time, social media prospecting can turn “likes” into dollars!
Editor’s Note: This was originally published on March 15, 2015, and has been updated with fresh content.
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