Mediaboss Marketing

Last week, we held an #SMTLive Twitter chat to share and discuss the findings from our recent report, The State of Social Lead Generation 2019 Survey Report.

Ever since Facebook was launched the early 2000s and social media took off as a means to connect, and share our lives digitally with others, businesses have also been taking advantage of social platforms in order to accomplish a variety of marketing and sales goals. For example, brands use social media to build brand awareness and loyalty, provide fast customer service, recruit employees, make sales. And, ideally, to generate leads.

For our survey report, we gathered close to 350 responses from fellow digital marketers to reveal some interesting social media lead generation trends happening today.You can download our full report here, but here are a few highlights from our conversation on Twitter last week.

Because social is constantly evolving and marketers need to keep up with the trends to remain relevant, we were curious to learn more about how brands are using social for lead gen today. How many brands rely on social for lead gen? What social platforms do they use to run lead gen ads? What types of ads work best for lead gen, today? ...And so on.

In our report, we found that the majority (64%) of our 320+ respondents already have a social media lead gen plan in place.

Interestingly,the poll we ran during our Twitter chat showed a similar outcome: 69% of participants said they already are using social media for lead generation. And 65% of those who already have a plan in place say their strategy needs improvement.

I think it's safe to say that social media is a major tool used by marketers today for lead generation, but not many of us have found the right system to accomplish this goal.

Which social networks are best for generating leads?

This one won't come as a huge shock to anyone; Facebook came out on top during our survey and during our Twitter chat as the main platform used for lead gen.

Once again, the poll from the chat complimented our findings from the report. Facebook took the lead as the best lead-gen platform, followed by LinkedIn and then Instagram.

Of course, every brand is different and each will approach their lead gen strategy differently. Some brands might find great success on Facebook while others will rely on another platform, like LinkedIn or Instagram, to reach their goals.

Regardless, the stats prove that Facebook is the go-to platform for lead gen. The question is, why?

Robin notes that "Facebook is the most affordable while also allowing for good targeting of leads."

This is the first question I posed during the chat that showed different results from our survey report.

We learned in our survey report that, in terms of social content and ads used for lead gen, marketers have found that images and video work best.

Although the poll didn't exactly reflect our report findings, the #SMTLive community agreed that video is extremely powerful, ranking video as #1.

To wrap up the conversation, we discussed a few best practices for social media lead generation.

Whether you choose to use still images or video, or you post an ad in the feed or in Stories, it's really all about how well you can make your content or ads blend into the user's feed.

There is an art to creating graphics and videos that both stand out (stop people from scrolling past) and blend in nicely to their feed of curated content. You want your content to look like your own, so working on templates that fit your style guide is a great place to start.

If you need some assistance or inspiration, here is a great article by one of our contributors all about building social media templates.

Hope you enjoyed the recap of this #SMTLive Twitter chat. You can read through highlights from past Twitter chats and RSVP for our next chat here.

Read more:
#SMTLive Recap: The State of Social Media Lead Gen 2019 - Social Media Today