Yesterday, Hubspot presented a webinar on using social media for lead generation. It was a wonderful, insightful presentation that had some great points on how to harness the power of social media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other networking sites – to get found by more prospects and generate sales leads for your business. Social media can be a powerful channel to attract website visitors and leads while building thought leadership for your company. Specifically:
How to incorporate social media into your overall marketing strategy
How to attract more website visitors from social media sites
How to leverage a social media community to share and promote your content
How to convert social media visitors into leads and customers
They’ve spelled out 12 key things you must consider when developing a social media program for your business.
It’s a good handbook for in-house marketers, as well as agencies, who are still trying to figure out how to replace their piece-meal campaign-after-campaign approach with a full-blown social media program.
Audience Identification. If you know who your audience is, you’re already one step ahead of the game. The next step is to figure out where they interact online.
Platform Development & Design. Figuring out how to engage and interact with this audience.
Brand Campaign Integration. It’s possible for a social media program to piggyback off a good brand campaign, but it has to be transformed into its cooler younger brother.
Content Creation/Coordination. You must create a consistent message.
Goal Mapping. In other words, how do you measure your success? Is it brand mentions? Traffic? Email sign ups? Leads? Sales?
Brand Identity. Everyone that is engaging via social media on your team must understand your goals and messaging.
Audience Attraction. Larger brands like to start spreading the word of their new, fancy and glossy initiatives at the outset, but if your social media program is good, your audience will find them on their own and the spread the word for you.
