How to Use B2B Social Prospecting to Generate Sales Leads
As a B2B marketer, you already understand the importance of social media as part of your marketing strategy. With more than one billion monthly active users on Facebook, and more than 230 million monthly active users on Twitter, you know that there’s more potential than ever to use social platforms to get your company’s name out there, spread your content and draw more people to your website.
That’s why smart inbound marketers also practice social media prospecting to discover untapped leads in social media. Social prospecting is the art of scouring the social web, identifying potential prospects, providing content to convert them into leads and getting those leads to your sales team.
To be effective at B2B social prospecting, you need to know the fundamentals of how to listen to social media conversations to find new leads for your business. This requires you to go beyond monitoring keywords to engaging with people who may not know about your company and what it can do for them. In the remainder of this post, we will explain how you can get started with social prospecting on the most popular social network for B2B marketers – LinkedIn.
Gather Content
Before you begin social prospecting on LinkedIn, you need to gather content that you can use to draw prospects to your website:
- Write down the top three keyword phrases that people use to find you on search. (Be sure to use business-focused keywords, which are favored on LinkedIn.)
- Think of three pieces of original content that are related to these three keyword phrases.
Get Started
To start prospecting, sign into LinkedIn and find some Groups to join. To do this, click the down arrow next to the top search box to display the drop-down menu shown below. Then select “Groups” to search all LinkedIn Groups.
Based on the Group descriptions that display, choose five LinkedIn Groups that could have prospects for your business and join them. (If you choose to join any private Groups, you will have to wait for the Group to accept you before you can interact there.)
Take Action
Once you have been accepted into five Groups, you can begin sharing the pieces of content you identified earlier. Start engaging with potential prospects by:
- Joining conversations in the Group where you can add value with your content
- “Liking” content that others are sharing in the Group
- Sharing your own content and posing your own questions to the Group
Keep Going
After you’ve made your initial foray into social media prospecting, you can keep the momentum going by continuing to engage with other LinkedIn users weekly. Here are a few simple steps that you can complete in only 20 minutes per week:
- Review the posts and content in the Groups you’ve joined (5 minutes)
- Comment on posts from others in your Groups (5 minutes)
- Evaluate the members you engage with the most to see if they are good prospects (5 minutes)
- Add value by sharing one piece of original content to the Groups you’ve joined (5 minutes)
For a worksheet that you can use to plan your social prospecting on LinkedIn – as well as worksheets for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest – download our free ebook.