Best Social Media Lead Generation Tactics for 2024

When it comes to lead generation, there are few channels better than social media. Researchers estimate that there are close to 5 billion social media users worldwide. People spend hours each day on social media, making it the perfect avenue for businesses to generate new leads for their sales and marketing teams. 

Regardless of whether you’re B2B or B2C, your target audience is on social media, and there’s a good chance they’re actively looking for what you have to offer. Social media isn’t just a brand awareness or engagement platform; it’s a venue for businesses to attract and cultivate new leads. 

To successfully generate social leads, businesses must take a strategic approach. As we’ll explain here, there’s an ever-growing range of social media lead generation tactics you can add to your marketing arsenal. Customizing them to the nuances of individual social media platforms and using the right social media marketing tools is key to your success. 

The Best Social Media Lead Generation Tactics for 2024

The goal of any social media lead gen tactic is to collect new social leads for your business. Your goal is to collect the contact details of prospective buyers for your business’s products and services and nurture them through your sales and marketing funnel. 

Social media lead generation is unquestionably a powerful marketing strategy. Seventy-five percent of B2B buyers use social media to help guide purchase decisions, and studies have shown that social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. 

Generating social media leads is clearly a strategy worth investing in, but it’s often difficult to know where to start. By harnessing the tactics outlined below, you’ll be well-placed to start increasing social media lead flow in your business. 

1. Optimize All Social Media Profiles

If you were to invite your friends around for a dinner party, we bet you’d clean your house beforehand. Optimizing your social media profiles before investing in social media lead gen campaigns follows the same principle. Before you invite a load of people over, clean up your profiles and make sure everything is just the way you want it. 

The role of your social media profiles is to encourage viewers to click through to your website to learn more about your business. Here are a few actionable ways to optimize your social presence:

• Invest in high-quality images, particularly profile images and header images that showcase your brand.
• Include all relevant contact information, including a phone number, website, location, and more.
• Create clear calls-to-action (CTAs). Include CTAs relevant to your business, such as signing up for a newsletter, scheduling an introductory meeting, or requesting more information. 

2. Create High-Quality Lead Magnets

To encourage social media leads to engage with your business, you need to give them something compelling in return. Enter lead magnets: high-quality pieces of content that include highly valuable information. 

Lead magnets are a central element of any content marketing strategy and can take many forms. Some of the most popular include:

• eBooks and white papers
• Webinar events
• Case studies
• Newsletters
• Free tools and resources (e.g. calculators, templates, and more)
• Quizzes

Lead magnets are typically gated content, meaning that users have to enter their contact information to view the resource. After you send the lead magnet, continue to follow up with additional nurturing emails to progress your business’s relationship with leads. You can use various forms of sales collateral in these campaigns. 

3. Build Targeted Ad Campaigns

Social media lead generation can work well organically, but if you want to accelerate progress, investing in targeted social media advertising is a proven path to success. 

Every social media platform has sophisticated ad targeting algorithms that enable you to serve hyper-targeted digital ads to the people most likely to buy from your business. It’s a powerful technology that helps businesses put the right offer in front of the right people, at the right time. 

Many platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, have specific ad formats designed for social media lead gen. You can test out a variety of offers: from sharing a lead magnet to offering a free trial to social media users. These are highly effective; LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms have a conversion rate of 13%, far higher than a traditional landing page. 

Don’t forget to invest in retargeting: social media ads shown to people who have already visited your website and engaged with your content. These ensure your business remains top-of-mind and boosts the likelihood of converting new leads. 

4. Host Virtual Events

In many industries, hosting virtual events and webinars is a fantastic way to generate new leads from social platforms while also demonstrating your business’s expertise. The scope of these events can vary. You might host a simple webinar on a topic that’s currently hot in your industry, or you can host a full-day digital conference. 

When hosting virtual events, choose topics that will pique the interest of your target audience and motivate them to take time out of their day to hear what you have to say. Consider recruiting well-known speakers and partnering with other businesses to expand your potential reach.

5. Turn Your Employees into Brand Ambassadors

Your brand’s social media profiles shouldn't be the only source of social leads. Your employees also play a key role – particularly the senior leaders of your business. 

A word of warning: not every executive will be comfortable with this. Focus on identifying ambitious, up-and-coming leaders who are hungry to generate new business and make a name for themselves. 

Encourage these employees to create and share content with their personal networks. LinkedIn is a particularly great platform for this. Here are some additional ideas: 

• Develop and share thought leadership content
• Start a LinkedIn newsletter
• Engage with other people, leaving constructive comments
• Host LinkedIn Live sessions
• Run an outbound LinkedIn campaign, connecting with people who fit your business’s customer profile and exchanging messages. 

Junior employees can participate, too. Encourage them to like, share, and comment on posts from your brand and executive’s social media profiles to ensure as wide an audience as possible discovers your business. 

Revitalize Your Social Media Lead Generation Strategy for 2024

Thanks to their advanced targeting capabilities and sophisticated features, social media platforms represent an invaluable lead generation resource for every business. Regardless of the types of products or services your business offers, social media platforms are a venue to connect with and introduce new customers to your brand. 

Get in touch if you’re looking for an experienced digital marketing partner to support your social media marketing efforts. Our team will partner with you to build and execute a strategic growth plan customized to the unique needs of your business.