You may well be inundated with new followers on Twitter. You may find yourself casually dropping this in to conversation, ‘Well, I now have 5000 Twitter followers.’ But how is that going to help your sales team or how is that going to impact on your social media lead generation and nurture for your SME?

‘That’s easy.’ You may suggest. ‘I’ll tweet the life out of them and they’ll just have to engage.’ Ah no, it doesn’t quite work like that. There may be 5000 Twitter followers but there’s a considerable amount of work to be done with all those names and quite a bit of record keeping to be achieved too. It takes effort to begin social media lead generation and nurture

The first thing to determine is whether your followers are potentially interested in you, your, brand, product or service. If they are just collecting links they are definitely not prospective customers. They are also nowhere near ready to engage with sales.

So at the very beginning of the journey it is essential to decide which followers might really become potential leads. This is where a social media lead generation and  nurture strategy can really pay off. If you are handling your own marketing and sales then this means you need a conversation with yourself. If there are two of you then a dialogue should ensue. So what should you be talking about?

Leadamo Academy’s Social Media Lead Generation and Nurture Strategy: The Very Basics

1, Decide how you will recognise what a potential lead actually looks like

2. What is the ideal profile of your dream customer? You might even want to list some criteria that may well just clinch the deal.

3. Decide whether a form of scoring methodology might be helpful and a shorthand way of making this calculation. For instance: where your lead might be in the world, the role of company if appropriate, the industry perhaps, what the lead does, their authority. Where they came from, what offer they are responding to and maybe their budget and need.

4. How can your behaviour demonstrate your trustworthiness, your reliability, your knowledge and expertise?

5. How interesting is your output to ensure social media lead generation and nurture?

6. Ask people how they rate your marketing on a first impression basis. After all, as we all know, we only have one shot at that.

7. Put yourself in a potential lead’s position. What piques their interest? What tempts them? What informs them? How can different types of leads be approached? What if they are cool, lukewarm or hot? Is your message different therefore? It should be. A sorting method will definitely help with this.

8. Behaviour has always been a key driver in supermarkets and you can leverage this yourself to measure engagement. Take a peek. Do they actually visit your site? If they did how long did they stay? How often do they visit? What do they read? What search terms got them there? Are they interested in high value pages like ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Pricing information?’ Have they shared your information and are other associates looking too?

The process can be more complicated than this but should you take note of the Leadamo Academy notes you will make a difference to how you generate leads that eventually convert.

Further Reading Lead scoring cheat sheet