Social selling or social media selling is a hot topic now. Most businesses know that they can reach a larger pool of potential customers by creating and maintaining social media profiles.
Creating and maintaining the profiles are a start, but then how do you find prospects for your business? And how do you pull them into your sales funnel?
In May, we posted this blog, “4 Must- Dos For Selling on Social Media“, which had some great tips on how to find prospects and develop relationships: http://benchmarkcrm.com/blog/4-must-dos-for-selling-on-social-media/.
So what do you do now? The answer is: you must capture their information.
To do this, you need a contact capture form and you need to offer something of value. If your audience already likes your content, they will sign up for something like a whitepaper or ebook. If you are online retail, coupons or specials always work great as lead bait.
You can leverage this form differently across social platforms. Here’s a brief list of the main social media platforms and how to utilize contact capture forms across them.
Facebook:
Facebook lets you embed a form onto a thumbnail image on your company page here:
Make sure that after you embed your form, you also post status updates so that your pages fans know that the form is there. Facebook also now allows you to use hashtags. Using a strategic hashtag in this post can expand the views for your status update and increase your form submissions. Here is a full blog on how to embed your form to Facebook: http://benchmarkcrm.com/blog/facebook-to-capture-leads-really/
Twitter:
You would want to post a link to a signup form. Make your status update to signup enticing in 140 characters or less and include a relevant hashtag to increase the posts reach.
LinkedIn:
The great thing about LinkedIn is when you post a link or update, you are allowed to share it into groups, which is a great way to increase the views with those who don’t follow your company or aren’t connected to you. Post the link to the sign up form with a brief description on your company page and then hit “share” and share to groups you think would have interest in signing up.
Pinterest:
Pinterest allows you to add a link to your image. So you can “Pin” an image of the actual form or of a sign up button. In the description area, describe what they get for signing up. Then make sure you link the image back to the original sign up form. Here’s a blog with a full description on how to do this, as well as other tips on lead generation using Pinterest: http://benchmarkcrm.com/blog/how-small-business-can-use-pinterest-for-lead-generation/
Once you have a prospects name and email you can start sending them more information about you and your company. Ideally, when they fill out a signup form, the prospect should be able to tell you what products and services they are interested in so that you can target them with relevant, interesting educational information on those specific items.