What Is Wrong With Your Social Media Lead Generation Strategy?

What Is Wrong With Your Social Media Lead Generation Strategy?: by Belinda Summers

Are you flushing money down the drain with your current social media lead generation strategy? A recent study conducted by IBM Corporation found that while almost 50% of the 1,161 companies surveyed put more money into B2B lead generation through social media in 2012, only about 22% said they were prepared to incorporate social media tools into their day-to-day operations. As a result, many of these tools and strategies meant for generating B2B sales leads are either unutilized or underperforming, or both.

Dan Zarrella, Hubspot’s Social Media Scientist and author of “Zarrella’s Heirarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas”, identified common myths that affect marketers’ ability to generate qualified sales leads and B2B appointments from their social media campaigns:
Myth #1: Engaging in social conversations is the most important part of every social media campaign.
The truth is that, with so many voices in the social community, people will not talk to you unless you have something worth talking about. In other words, before you can join in the conversation, you have to have some good ideas and expose people to them. Zarrella pointed out that engaging in conversations does not build reach and generate sales leads; instead, marketers should link prospects to valuable information. In short, get a large social media following and regularly tweet links to quality content.
Myth #2: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are bad days to post messages.
Actually, this one may be true. The problem now is that everyone avoids the “bad” days. And with large volumes of content being published from Monday to Thursday, your message will likely drown out if you follow the crowd. Studies found that messages posted on Facebook and Twitter during the weekends get more attention and have significantly higher ‘retweet’ and ‘share’ volumes than the ones published between Monday and Thursday. So, if you want a message shared on social media, post it during the weekend where there are fewer stories to compete for your readers’ attention.
Social media marketing is hot nowadays, and while other business lead generation methods like SEO and B2B telemarketing are still widely used, it has clearly become an important aspect of modern sales lead generation and B2B appointment setting campaigns.
This post originally appeared at CallBoxInc.