How to use Facebook to generate business leads

How to use Facebook to generate business leads

Social media is not about making money or increasing your Return On Investment. It is all about branding and will remain so. Branding is the most important thing if you want to bring a positive impact to your business and you can do a decent job of the same with Facebook.

Facebook is the most commonly used tool for lead generation

To ensure that your leads become loyal customers, you need to ensure the quality of your products because there is no point in bringing people in if your product is not perfect. Keeping that point in mind, you can remember the following points for lead generation:

Using Calls-to-Action technique in the cover photos

FB had a clause that prevented people from using call to action words in their cover photos and captions initially. Once the clause was removed by FB, it opened up a whole new way of generating leads.

You must expand your reach

Reach is the most important thing in generating leads. If you have the maximum number of fans then it means you have greater reach that could get converted into leads. Each time you get a fan, it would increase your chances of getting a potential customer. Make people come into your fold by adding the “follow me” button in your page. Insert additional links that would direct them to your website. Having good content in your page would also inspire more and more people to come and visit your page often. Once they ‘subscribe’, they will get regular updates to your website. Have links there, so people who read the content would visit your website as well. People who are impressed with the content will share them on their wall, and more and more people would be prompted to come.

Nothing beats the popularity you can generate through FB

Everybody is obsessed with likes, shares and comments on Facebook, the more the number of likes, the more they are happy. They all want to know how much people actually saw the post. Likes comments and shares are considered as indicators of the success of a social media campaign, and you can measure the resonance of a post by checking these indicators. Unfortunately that still doesn’t tell the whole story and many people are not aware of it. Posting on Facebook is so much different from making a real presentation. In the latter, you can see the reaction of the listeners and perform accordingly. Whereas, when you are making a presentation in FB, it is always as if you are standing behind the curtain. You are invited to make a presentation and you do it, but you don’t know who all are there in the room and if any are actually listening.

Adding links to captions

There is a world of difference between simple captions and links added to the caption. If you see an ordinary caption, you will just read through it and forget it promptly, unless it is very striking and memorable. On the other hand, if there is a good link along with the caption, you would be motivated to click on the same and read the article that follows it.

Getting involved in Facebook chat

A chat is where people get together. You can create a community where people would get together, meet and discuss. If FB can bring in an expert to clear the queries of people, then that would motivational enough for them. If people get the impression that you are trust worthy and would get back to them with answers then they would be loyal as well. Facebook chat must be used to share resources, not spam.

Lead generation through webinars

You can create a Facebook event to capture leads and use those leads to conduct a webinar. You can invite your leads to the Facebook event and through that to the webinar. FB events are more attractive than FB posts because they always stand out.

People who like your post Vs people who people saw it

The main thing that everyone wants to know is this – how many people liked my post. We all know that the number of people who ‘saw’ the post would always be bigger than the number of people who ‘liked’ it. People who work at Facebook also admits that what people want to know more is about the number of people who liked their post, and that they are not really worried about the number of people that ‘saw’ the post. However, they also agree that they currently display this information to people who work as Page owners and group members who are not advertisers.

A report by Inbound Marketing says that 52% of the people who marketed through FB were able to source leads. And that means 48% of the people have not sourced their leads through the site. Which category do you belong to? If it is the latter, then you need to follow the above mentioned tips to help bring you more leads. In case you belong to the first group, you can refresh these tactics and generate more leads.

Conclusion

These are just a few ways through which you can develop leads through FB. Some methods may work for many while some may not. It is only by trying different variations will you be able to generate leads and improve your branding.

Interesting links about the topic:
How to make more bussiness using facebook
Important tips to make bussiness leads using facebook

Pictures: Flickr.com/ Bernard Goldbach/ D@LY3D

The author: Reema Oamkumar is engaged as a thought leader at Software-Developer-India.com which is a part of the YUHIRO Group. YUHIRO is a German-Indian enterprise which provides programmers to IT companies, agencies and IT departments.