It’s 2025. If you’re not using social media to generate new leads and opportunities for your business or organization, then you’re missing out on the greatest single marketing tool at your disposal! From LinkedIn and Facebook to Instagram and X, social media should be a well-formed and indispensable part of your marketing strategy.
So, whether you’re still trying to understand social marketing, or perhaps just dipping your toes into the sea of potential, let’s take a look into how you can use social marketing to generate more opportunities for your organization!
Silence those Siloes!
Because sales teams and marketing departments have the same goals – generating high-quality leads, working opportunities, and winning customers – it’s often quite astounding that they remain so distant from one another. There are of course historical, structural, and political reasons that we won’t go into here, but if you can get synergy between these two critical teams, then you’re heading in the right direction!
What’s that got to do with social media? Well, firstly, to make the most out of your investment in social marketing, you need to reach the widest possible audience with the most compelling content. Did you know that there’s over 5 billion people on social media?
Creating that content and messaging is the responsibility of the marketing department, but it needs to be informed by insights gleaned from the sales team. After all, they’re the ones responsible for closing the qualified leads generated from your social media activity!
Then, once the content is published, you’ll need both sales and marketing (at the least) to help drive the organic reach of your posts! Luckily, there are some amazing tools out there, like Click Social, that are designed to help do just that. More on that later.
Be the “ME” in Social Media!
Not you personally (unless you’re the brand!), but your organization! Don’t hold back. Shout about your brand and your business. Remember, on social media, you need to stand out amongst the millions of other conversations taking place across every platform! Be bold and offer your audience valuable content that inspires, shows thought leadership, solves or entertains, and clearly links to your business.
Your aim is to create posts and content that social media users and advocates want to share! The more shares you have, the wider reach you get, which increases the likelihood of high-quality leads encountering your brand organically – the holy grail of social media marketing!
“More important than watch time or like and comment counts is send rates, [and] generally, I think the rate is more important than the count. So the number of sends per reach, the number of likes per reach, the number of comments per reach. But sends per reach correlate more, in my experience, with overall reach than anything else, because we are looking to help people discover content they want to connect with friends over, and so sends is a great proxy for that sort of connection over creativity” – Source
Top Tips for Social Media Content:
- Be adaptable. Embrace the fact that the social media landscape is constantly changing and be ready to create content and ideas that are new and different.
- Be quick. We live in a 24-hour news cycle. When you see something trending on social media, get your voice, your opinion, and your brand out there as soon as you can!
- Be original. Social media fatigue is real! Offer something that your audience hasn’t seen or heard before and entice them to stop scrolling and engage with your content!
- Be engaging. If your audience and potential leads are commenting on your social media posts, then they’re already engaging with your brand. That’s a lead! Don’t ignore your comments section – there’s business to be had!
- Be competitor aware. Follow your competition – they’re probably following you! Look at what is working for them – what gets likes, comments, engagements – and do it better. See what’s not, and don’t make the same mistakes!
- Be brand consistent. You’ve probably spent years building up your brand and style. Don’t change that for social media – and use the right tools to maintain control of it!
Embrace the Automation!
Generating high-quality leads from social media marketing is time-consuming, especially for marketing teams. Creating relevant content, ensuring that it works for multiple platforms, scheduling, posting monitoring, adapting, encouraging other employees to share – the exhausting list goes on!
Every organization will have used some form of marketing automation system, even if it’s something as simple as sending bulk text messages! To make the most out of your social media strategy, you need to look at tools to help you become smarter, more effective, and more efficient at posting. That’s where tools like Click Social can give you a real competitive advantage.
Whether you’re using the advanced AI technology to help you create compelling posts, reducing your time spent scheduling and posting by utilizing unified views and calendars, or taking advantage of CRM-integrated reporting that allows you to monitor results in real-time, a powerful social media tool WILL make the difference!
Employee Advocacy – It’s a Team Sport!
We touched upon the need to encourage other parts of your business to get involved in sharing your posts on their own channels and platforms. This creates that all important organic reach and can touch potential leads that you wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to.
However, it can sometimes be a struggle to get your peers and employees to share work-related content on their own channels. Using a tool that has an employee advocacy feature will make that much easier. Here are a few things to look out for:
- Leaderboards – It’s all about the game!
Sharing work-related content can be fun as well as productive when you turn advocacy into a more satisfying experience and motivate your employees to become thought leaders! A built-in leaderboard gives your team a way to see their individual impact, helps them to identify what resonates with their networks and, of course, encourages them to engage in some friendly, but worthwhile, competition!
- Content Segmentation – Give them what they want!
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to posting on social media. Your employees and advocates have diverse interests, varied audiences, and different goals (think Sales and HR!), so they don’t always want to share the same content. This feature gives you the power to segment your posts by topic, department, region/language, and more. By making it easier to find a pre-approved post that suits their audience, you encourage your advocates to post more frequently!
- Brand Consistency – Every post counts!
An effective Employee Advocacy feature will help to amplify all the good things you have to say about your organization, but left unchecked on social media, it’s easy for advocates to unwittingly send the wrong message! A useful tool will help you maintain control of your brand across all platforms with well-defined approval processes and checks on suggested content to remove sensitive words or phrases.
It’s that Easy!
Okay, it’s not that easy. But by following some simple tips and rules, using the right tools and technology, and encouraging and enabling employee advocacy, you can super-charge your social media strategy faster than you think!
What are you waiting for?!
Social media is a 21st century goldmine for lead generation, so go out and find those nuggets!
You can schedule a demo of Click Social here, or visit www.clickdimensions.com to discover more about our suite of powerful marketing automation tools!
