Lead Generation activity dominates as one of the most important objectives for today’s marketing professionals. Whether you are using a content strategy to drive prospects down the funnel or using your email automation tool to nurture potential prospects, ultimately the goal of any marketer is to generate more sales qualified leads. In order to continue populating your marketing database, you must first start capturing intelligence on potential prospects to fill the top of your funnel. Most organizations do this by purchasing (or renting) a list. Through the rise of Social Media though, more intelligence is available to today’s marketer, so how can you leverage Social Media and turn it into a lead generation machine?
There are many blogs discussing how to use Linkedin in your prospecting efforts. I would recommend reading some of Jamie Shanks’ posts at Sales4Life to learn more about harnessing the power of Linkedin for lead generation. Whether you are using the Linkedin Signal feature or looking for decision makers/appropriate contacts to dial into, Linkedin has proven to be the number one social site for B2B prospecting.
In regards to Twitter, Insideview or Social Selling University has created multiple pieces of content that I would recommend; at the fore front would be their ebook The Ultimate Guide: How To Use Twitter For Social Selling. In it you will learn the right tools and strategies for branding, prospecting and building your sales pipeline. They cover all of the terms you would need to know and discuss proper strategies to incorporate social selling into your lead generation machine.
Both Twitter and Linkedin are great platforms for generating leads, but they may be more conducive to sales reps than marketers. When looking at trying to pull large pieces of data off of social sites, both Twitter and Linkedin are not a fit. At least, not at first glance. We recently spoke with some folks at Social123 and I must say I am amazed at the capabilities. It was only a matter of time before someone was able to capitalize on the amounts of intelligence available through social media outlets. Now using Social123, you are able to pull a list based on twitter handles, have that list appended with Linkedin data and produce a marketing list containing Name, Title, Company, and Email Address. Want to know who some of the biggest thought leaders in the industry are following? Put in their twitter handle and reveal who these thought leader’s follow on Twitter. Want to know who your biggest competitors are following? Again, all you need to provide is the Twitter handle and let the algorithms do the rest. There are more intelligence pieces you could gather, but for marketers, the above mentioned data sets are enough to start building a marketing list.
Both Twitter and Linkedin cannot be overlooked for their importance in the social selling process. But for marketers, Social123 should be the tool at the top of your list of must have resources in 2013. Has anyone discovered other tools similar to Social123 that can pull data from social sites and comprise a marketing list?
