How to Leverage Social Platforms for B2B Lead Generation?

Last Updated on 30/10/2024

Acquiring fresh, high-quality leads is often the most challenging part for businesses. While traditional mediums–cold calling, networking shows, telemarketing, and direct mail–still exist, B2B lead generation requires you to go out of the box. 

Fortunately, we live in 2024, the most connected time in human history. Social media dominates this hyper-connected world. Lead generation is about creating and cultivating connections to eventually convert the connection (or interest) into a sale. 

Therefore, piecing the puzzle together explains why social media has emerged as the biggest lead generation powerhouse–90% of marketers say so. In the B2B realm, for example, LinkedIn–the largest professional networking platform–generated 80.33% of B2B leads from social channels. 

But generating leads through social media without a clear action plan is like trying to sail a ship without a compass. There’s a cheat sheet to success, too.

With eight years of social media marketing automation experience–especially in LinkedIn outreach–I’ll show you how you can make social media your giant lead-generation machine.

a. Identifying the Best Platforms for B2B Lead Generation 

There are over 200 social media platforms, but not all will be worth your lead generation effort. Though every medium has unique advantages, ideally, choose only a few platforms. These will be the social media channels where your prospects spend most of their time.

With 63 million decision-makers, LinkedIn is the leading platform for B2B lead generation. 20% of LinkedIn users make purchase decisions for their business. It’s the most popular social networking media among Fortune 500 companies–your target demographic. 

The best of all, you don’t have to spend a fortune to see lead conversion on LinkedIn. Leveraging the platform’s paid plan, you can identify decision-makers and directly initiate a conversation through Inmail. 

X (formerly Twitter), the popular microblogging media, is also a lucrative platform. Though not great for direct lead generation, X is where opinions, humor, news, and stories are shared every second. 

The 336 million active users make the platform a gold mine for focusing on thought leadership, trend tracking, and real-time engagement. You can stay on top of emerging trends, follow relevant industry hashtags, and grow your brand visibility through X.

While often overlooked, Facebook is also a platform you can’t miss. As the biggest social network in the world, it hosts 91% of B2B marketers, among which 67% use it for lead generation. 

Even better, combine all these three platforms, and they’ll become your lead generation titan. If your budget is extended, add the following platform to the mix:

• YouTube for video marketing
• Instagram for brand storytelling
• TikTok for humanizing your brand 

b. Optimizing Company Profiles Across Social Platforms

Next, optimizing–which goes beyond a high-quality profile picture, cover photos, and contact information (though they are also crucial). Your profile should let people know what you do–the kind of company and products/services you offer. Plus, a well-optimized profile also helps you rank on search results on the platforms.

Therefore, starting with LinkedIn, identify keywords for which you want to be visible. For example, if you provide a cloud-based cybersecurity solution, you can target keywords like data protection, threat detection, and network security. Include these keywords in your title, bio, hashtags, and posts.

Leverage the featured section on your LinkedIn profile to highlight your key products, services, case studies, and testimonials. 

BROWNIE TIP: Ensure the LinkedIn company page has a clear value proposition and a CTA like “Contact Us” or “Download Whitepaper.”

The same goes for X and Facebook—pin tweets about your most valuable offer or success stories. Use Facebook’s ‘Service‘ and ‘About‘ sections and the ‘CTA‘ buttons.

The most important factor here is consistency. While you’ll optimize the profiles a little differently for every platform–thanks to algorithms–it still needs to be YOU. Therefore, create a brand-voice guideline for all your channels (social, online, and offline). In the guideline, clearly describe your:

• Tone of voice
• Language style
• Messaging framework
• Brand personality
• Key value proposition
• Visual consistency (color palette, design elements, images)

This will help you create uniform social profiles and ensure consistency in content, conversations, and overall customer experience. 

c. Creating Engaging Content to Drive B2B Leads 

Now, one of the most crucial parts of ensuring your brand’s consistent lead generation potential on social media is content. Remember, every content should serve a purpose–to educate, guide, empathize, or entertain. 

Educational content rules LinkedIn. This includes white papers, case studies, and LinkedIn articles. Offer how-to guides, step-by-step tutorials, and actionable solutions demonstrating your expertise. 

Integrate visually compelling storytelling with images, infographics, and charts. Following the success of TikToks and Instagram Reels, LinkedIn recently launched its short-video format content on the platform. Make sure you leverage it for your B2B lead generation, too.

Webinars that dive deep into clients’ pain points work great as lead magnets. So, consider hosting monthly LinkedIn Live webinars to strengthen your brand and product positioning as the solution. 

Once you’ve built brand authority, start sharing gated content–downloadable guides or webinar recordings–to gather leads directly on social channels. 

If all of this seems too complex, create a content calendar. Juggling multiple social media channels is not easy. However, a content calendar will streamline the content creation process and ensure consistent frequency across platforms. 

With that clear, here’s a great starting point:

• 2-3 weekly LinkedIn Post with a mix of thought leadership, promotional content, and industry news
• One Monthly Facebook and LinkedIn Live (webinars, behind-the-scenes, and Q&A sessions)
• Post 3-5 times per week–blog articles, client testimonials, and product highlights, and participate in group discussions
• X thrives on frequent, real-time interaction, so aim to post daily with industry updates and tips and join trending conversations with relevant hashtags. 

d. Using Paid Ads for Precise Lead Generation

While content creation and engagement are crucial, they are not the only tools in your social media tool kit. Paid advertising on social media is a great addition to boost your lead generation tangibly.

The ads allow you to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors, placing you directly in front of your target audience. All the social platforms–LinkedIn, Facebook, and X—offer paid ad options.

LinkedIn, for example, helps you niche down on the audience for ads with advanced targeting options such as job titles, industries, and company size. It is even better to utilize the platform’s audience segmentation for more personalized ad campaigns that reach different decision-making levels. 

Next, you can present these ads in different ways. These include sponsored posts, display ads, and lead-generation forms, with forms reaping the highest conversions.

Lead generation ads go one step further, allowing you to gather platform leads. With their built-in lead generation form, for example, both LinkedIn and Facebook make it ridiculously easy to collect leads. 

The built-in format of forms helps reduce the friction of manually filling out every section. LinkedIn Lead Generation Forms, for example, directly lead prospects to the form when they click the CTA. 

These forms will be pre-populated with relevant information from the leads’ profiles. Then, you can send the completed form to your CRM and start the follow-up sequence. 

The result: lead-gen forms have an average conversion rate of 13%, compared with a 2.35% average conversion rate of landing pages.

There are also ways to amplify lead generation from conversion. For example, you can run a sponsored content campaign with a high-value resource (e.g., eBook or report) to capture qualified leads through Lead Gen Forms.

You can score even more leads by setting up sequential retargeting ads. For B2B audiences, you can leverage Facebook ads to retarget visitors who have interacted with your LinkedIn ad campaigns. Say a prospect clicked on the lead-generation form but never submitted it. This is your cue to retarget them on different channels, encouraging them to convert.  

However, don’t just let your lead data sit on the platform. Extract your leads from LinkedIn Sales Navigator into your system. This will ensure data preservation and ease of sharing leads across teams. 

e. Measuring Success and Optimizing LinkedIn Strategies 

Finally, measure how well your strategy works and optimize. Define your KPIs and track them. For lead generation, the most relevant KPIs will include:

• Engagement (reactions, comments, share, and saves)
• Cost-per-lead
• Conversion rate
• Click-through rate
• Lead quality
• Gated content downloads

LinkedIn Analytics and campaign managers are the perfect ways to monitor these KPIs closely. They will give you a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not. Document the metric report.

Use the metrics to optimize the process and test new content formats and engagement strategies. A/B tests creative ads, messaging, and CTAs to improve lead quality.  

Crush Your Social Media Lead Generation

Social media is a powerhouse for lead generation–but only when used strategically. LinkedIn, being the go-to B2B social networking platform, is the engine that’ll fuel this powerful.

Just remember that it is supposed to be social and a never-ending process. Therefore, implement the above tips: regularly review your social media strategy, track the KPIs, experiment, and optimize. 

You’ll soon start attracting leads who are interested in what you have to offer, and the conversion rate will show the results you’ve always wanted. 

Contributor:

Daria Erina is the Managing Director of Linked Helper. She joined Linked Helper soon after the project was born, and became the first customer support agent. She’s on a mission to make the Linked Helper’s solution feel like a piece of cake to new and existing customers, specifically by creating high-quality content.