Since its launch in 2004, Facebook has grown exponentially, reaching the 100 million user milestone just 4 years after its conception. From here, constant technological and social development and a center stage in the media has led to the well-oiled social media platform that we all know and love today.
However, this is by no means the end of the story, especially for social marketers like you and me. With over 1.1 billion active monthly users, and an abundance of opportunities for targeting and paid advertisements, Facebook should be a key aspect in any lead generation campaign.
With only 50% of marketers using Facebook for lead generation, the audience is up for grabs and by following these 5 top lead generation strategies, that audience could be all yours... But how?
To find out you can keep reading or download our Ebook on the science behind successful Facebook Advertising.
1) Contagious Content
For content that works on Facebook, the key is to strike a balance between offering content that is valuable for brand positioning, and content that is fun and shareable on social channels.
If you can show value to your followers, your lead generation efforts can have a huge network effect. Here at Sherpa, we have found that to successfully generate leads on Facebook, you need:
- Compelling messages
- Eye-catching visual
- Mass audience appeal and share-ability
- A clear CTA
- Personality!
Read the HubSpot blog on 12 of the best Facebook posts for lead generation here.
2) The News Feed
This is the heart and soul of Facebook, so if you can understand how to optimise the algorithms behind the news feed to your advantage, then you will have a powerful tool to add to your repertoire.
So how do you get your posts to appear? Well, if users and their networks engage with your content, it will show up in the feed, if not, it will be dropped. Some of the other factors the algorithm considers are:
- Affinity - How close is the relationship between the user and the content?
- Weight - What type of action was taken on the content?
- Decay - How current is the content?
- Post Types - Which type of posts does a user typically interact with?
3) Promoted Posts
The key to promoting posts is to always include a strong CTA in the post, for example, ask your followers to download an asset, attend a webinar or learn about a new product... you want people to have something to click on!
How do promoted posts work? You can promote a post (including status updates, videos, blog posts and offers) directly from your News Feed, and any of these will then automatically appear higher up. In addition Facebook live videos appear higher in the News feed than anything else, and you can read about 7 of the best Facebook Live Videos that we've ever seen here.
4) Facebook Ads
Facebook ads provide highly targeted opportunities to reach your audience. You place a bid on how much you want to pay per click or alternatively you can pay per thousand impressions. Much like a typical PPC ad, the cost depends on the popularity of your keyword terms.
You can also target Facebook ads based on a variety of demographic criteria including location, job title, age, industry, gender and more.
5) Tracking and Results
Facebook's page insights application provides fantastic analytics, tracking and a variety of engagement and ad performance metrics. Page insights will let you see:
- Page likes
- Post reach
- Engagement
- Organic/paid reach per post
- Post clicks
- Post likes
- Comments
- Shares
I hope that you find these 5 top lead generation strategies for Facebook helpful, if you want help with any other sort of demand generation we've been doing it for a long time now and you can read about everything we've learnt here. Remember, Facebook is constantly changing and while these ideas are a strong start to success, nothing beats testing each strategy for your own audience!
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