by Josh Peters (shuaism)

Lead generation and acquisition is one of the four main types of marketing campaigns and yes, social media can be used in it. Actually, it can be used quite effectively so long as you have all of your other ducks in a row first. Which if you need help with there are resources that can help you with that. There will be more on that in a bit. First let’s talk about what this very important type of campaign is.

A Lead generation and acquisition is any campaigns used to gather information (like email addresses, profiles, mailing addresses, etc) with the goal of getting a list of people who are likely to buy from you. This type of campaign is usually measured by ROI to determine if what you’re doing is working, because if you’re spending more money than you’re bringing in, then you have a problem. This is also going to be covered a few paragraphs down the page.

Before you start using Social Media for Lead Generation and Acquisition
If you already have some lead generation strategies and tactics in use then go over them with a fine tooth comb and make sure they are easy to go through and don’t require too many hurdles. Assess what you want people to sign up for, and what ways they can get there. If you’re going to be sending people directly to your site make sure you have some targeted landing pages setup for your various types of leads.

Make sure you have your marketing funnels in place and that you are familiar with where people go at each step so you can send people there directly. You don’t want to send someone to step 1 if they are already at step 3. This will help keep your fall out numbers as low as possible.

If needed diagram out your current processes and look at the ways you can get people to the various parts. This is how you create your plan for inserting them and gathering the leads. Spending lots of time here and effort here can keep you from wasting a lot of your time and your potential customers time later on.

Setting up Social Media for Lead Generation and Acquisition
If your company is already involved in social media then you should have your listening strategies and tactics in place so you know where your customers are and what they talk about. If not, now would be a good time to start. This will help you setup your social media lead generation.

Excluding the millions of forums, niche networks, and sites that your customers could be hanging out on there are 2 “de facto” sites that are very quickly emerging as the two you “need” to be a part of and one platform you should have. You see them on tv commercials, in ads, and part of more and more campaigns. They are Twitter an Facebook. These two have risen above and so I’m going to talk about them briefly.*

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