How to Use Twitter & Facebook Paid Social Media Services for Leads

Last week we covered how Business to Business companies could leverage LinkedIn ads as part of their lead generation process. This week, we’ll touch on two other powerful and proven paid social media services.  

Promoting on Twitter and Facebook

A few points to consider before we get in to the details of these paid social media lead generation tools:

• B2C brands can leverage both Twitter and Facebook effectively.
• Although Facebook ads are highly targetable, we only recommend their use for B2C companies who want the most from their Social Media Marketing budget. (LinkedIn is the better social media development choice for B2B companies).

With that in mind, we’ll start today’s conversation with promoted tweets on Twitter and how to set them up effectively as part of your social media lead generation strategy.

Promoted Tweets

This is the more simple of the two processes, but highly effective for both consumer-oriented and business to business companies.

To set up your promoted tweets on Twitter follow these steps:

• Log in to your Twitter Account.
• Go to Settings.
• Click on Twitter Ads. (You have to log in again to access this sub domain.)
• You’ll land on a page that will welcome you to Twitter Ads.
• Set a geo-target for your promoted tweets.
• Recommended: Select three regions that house your target market to start.
• Skip the “Promote your Account” option.
• Recommended: Test promoted tweets within your target market first to gauge responsiveness of your target market. Promoted tweets offer tools, education or content to your audience, not just asking that they follow your profile, but giving them a reason that you can be of service to them.
• Select your daily budget for your promoted tweets as well as setting a cap on the cost per click for each interested twitter user.
• Manually select your tweets.
• Recommended: Promote a tweet relating to an upcoming event, webinar or speaking engagement you are holding. Or, promote a recent article or blog post that takes a controversial or thought-leader position on a hot topic.
• Select a payment method and start advertising.

Two more tips for using tweets in your paid social media lead generation efforts.

• Let your promoted tweets run for about 2 weeks.
• Use a bit.ly link to gauge real-time response from your viewers.

Facebook Ads

Facebook offers an easy to follow setup process for their paid social media services. The image to the right shows the entire process to build your Facebook Ad and make it live. There are several tips to keep in mind when building a Facebook ad for your brand.

First, decide on your target. The targeting capabilities of the ads are the most-coveted aspect of this particular lead generation tool. Be as specific as possible when considering who you want to reach, because Facebook is going to ask you some fairly specific targeting questions, including:

• Location: all the way down to the target zip codes.
• Age and Gender: what is your audience gender or age?
• Interests: manually enter specific interests, like an upcoming event, industry, television show, product, hobby, etc. Or select from the offered list of interests categorized by Facebook.
• Advanced Targeting Options: Further hone your targeted Facebook audience with options like relationship status, education or workplace.

As noted earlier, Facebook’s targeting tool is unique. Once you have your target set, it’s important to decide what you will promote.  In other words, what would you consider a lead generating response? Do you want them to attend a webinar, click through to a landing page, contact your sales team?

When you know the answer to this question, you are ready to build the headline and subtext of your Facebook ad. Some tips on building this ad text:

• The limited character length of the headline (25 with spaces) and the ad subtext (90 with spaces) means you have to be very engaging with very few words.
• Be direct with your headline. What action do you want them to take? Don’t be afraid to ask them to do exactly what you want them to do in the headline. Then use the subtext to explain the benefit to them when they do.
• Select your image. We do not recommend just using a logo.  The size of the image, 72px x 100 px leaves very little room for a lot of imagery.
• Use a graphic that will draw attention.  People, babies and animals gain the most attention in a short amount of time.

One more tip to effectively use your paid Facebook social media services. A/B test your Facebook ad for two weeks. Change only one aspect of the ad for each test. Change your headline, or the ad text to see which ad garners the most response from your target market.

Paid social media services should be part of every web marketing strategy. Take the time to understand how Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn relate to your business, your target market and your lead generation proces, then begin investing in these targeted tactics.