Chapter 9

Creating Lasting Relationships Through Social Media

In This Chapter

Sharing on social media

Getting the most out of Facebook

Leveraging Twitter

Engaging through LinkedIn

Getting visual with Pinterest

Attracting attention with SlideShare

The fact that all businesses need to be on social media is not a groundbreaking revelation. Everybody knows that. And hopefully most of you are working on building your social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the other major social channels. (If you aren’t, get going on that ASAP!)

However, there has been a significant shift in how businesses are using social media. In the past, it was difficult to tie social media to lead generation, but today’s social strategy includes specific tactics for generating leads through social channels. Of course, social media is still extremely important for generating brand awareness and buzz, but the impact that social media has on lead generation is continuing to gain traction.

Here are some cold, hard facts about social media:

• One-third of global B2B buyers use social media to engage with their vendors, and 75 percent expect to use social media in future purchasing processes.
• Sixty-four percent of marketers rate social media as the most important factor in organic search success, behind only effective web pages, which are cited as most important by 82 percent.
• Sixty percent of B2B companies have acquired customers through LinkedIn, followed by 60 percent through the company blog, 43 percent through Facebook, and 40 percent through Twitter.
• By spending as little as six hours per week on social media, 64 percent of marketers see lead-generation benefits from it.

It has become increasingly important for businesses to make themselves available to their leads in a personal and accessible way, and social media fits the bill for this type of communication. And because today’s buyer likes to self-educate, social media is the perfect outlet to showcase educational content.

Additionally, the casual nature of social interactions is perfect for nurturing leads. Rather than having one-way conversations with your potential buyers, social media marketing allows you to build a relationship with prospects in an informal, personable, and low-pressure way. At the same time, by coming up in the social feeds of high-value leads, you can remain top-of-mind until your lead is finally ready to buy.

Sharing on Social Media

Social media gives businesses the perfect platform to share their expertise in a personal, human way. And because the nature of social media lends itself well to content sharing, you can get access to the networks of your followers through an emphasis on peer-to-peer influence marketing.

A recent study from Nielsen showed that only 33 percent of buyers believe what a brand has to say about itself because people view brand-to-buyer communication as advertising. However, if a buyer gets valuable insight from a peer, he is much more likely to pay attention. By sharing valuable content on social channels, you can tap into the power of peer-to-peer communication and word of mouth.

Sharing on social media and leveraging the power of your followers’ sharing network has significant benefits, such as

• Increased brand authenticity
• Generating a lead at a low cost
• Increased trust
• Increased network reach
• Access to new opportunities

Marketo uses an iceberg analogy to describe social media reach and sharing. On the surface, you see the tip of the iceberg, which represents your social network, including all your Facebook fans, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, and so on. But when you look beyond the surface and underneath the water, you see the whole iceberg. You see not only your own direct network but also the friends of those in your network — the iceberg.

Time spent sharing on social media can yield impressive lead-generation results. Marketo takes lead generation on social media sites very seriously. They have developed five golden rules of social media marketing that you should keep in mind when you start developing your campaigns:

• Don’t take yourself too seriously. Social media is about being social, and that means you need to have a good personality in order to make your brand likable so that people will want to follow you.
• Have great content and good offers. Without well-produced, engaging content, any tactics you employ will most likely fail.
• You need a strong call-to-action. A strong CTA is just as important in your social media strategy as everywhere else. Be clear about what you want your audience to do after consuming your content or engaging with your brand.
• Always add value. At the end of the day, if you are not providing your prospects and customers some sort of value, you are not doing your job, and social media ultimately won't drive leads.
• Social media is a two-way street. No one likes being talked at. Yes, you can broadcast your message, but remember to keep the lines of communication open in both directions. When contacted, always respond quickly and sincerely. Be sure to mix up your messaging and use a combination of content and offers.

Utilizing the 4-1-1 rule

So what should you share on social channels? You need to have a good mix of educational and promotional content. I like to refer to the 4-1-1 rule to designate what should be shared on social channels. The 4-1-1 rule was popularized by Tippingpoint Labs and Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi and was initially created to use on Twitter.

The rule states that, “For every self-serving tweet, you should retweet one relevant tweet and most importantly, share four pieces of relevant content written by others.” Now, you don’t have to follow this exactly. The relevant four pieces of content can be written by your company. It is fine to share your own content as long as these pieces are educational. Plus, you want people to fill out forms for your content pieces, so this is critical. Remember, early-stage leads won’t fill out forms to get a datasheet if they have never heard about your company, so offering them valuable content prompts them to share their information.

The 4-1-1 formula can easily be applied to each of the social networks. As an example, say I work for a vitamin company and am creating my social media editorial calendar for the day. My posts might look like the following:

• Post 1: Promotional. Information on our weekend 30-percent-off women’s vitamins sale.
• Post 2: Relevant content from others. Retweet or share an article from The New York Times on the importance of taking a multivitamin every day.
• Post 3: Educational content from a well-respected industry thought leader. Ebook on the right mix of vitamins during pregnancy.
• Post 4: Educational content from company. Infographic on the increase of vitamin intake since 2007.
• Post 5: Educational content from company. Blog post on the best new vitamins for 2014.
• Post 6: Educational content from company. Ebook on what ingredients to look for in your vitamins.

Creating contagious content

In order for your content to be Liked and shared on social channels, it has to be contagious — fun, interesting, and shareable. You won’t get very far creating a true social following if all you post is self-promotional items. Why would someone want to tell everyone in her network that your company won some random award? Despite what you might think, she probably wouldn’t. But what would she share? Maybe a fun meme that you created to promote your new ebook or an announcement of a contest that you are hosting.

The key to effective lead generation on social channels is a solid social following. People won’t be tempted to fill out your forms on social channels if you aren’t posting anything interesting.

But what does work on social channels? Content that is visual, interactive, and often amusing prompts people to look at, share, and interact with your content. The more people who interact and share your content, the more leads you can get.

As an example, consider a meme that Marketo posted on Facebook to promote a new content asset: a shot of Justin Timberlake with “I'm bringing email back” superimposed on it. The idea was to take an asset theme, which was email marketing, and present it to a social audience on Facebook in a relevant way. It resulted in more than 15,000 likes at the time of this writing, an organic reach of 64,576 people, and 7,100 clicks to the asset. It had a Facebook engagement rate of 17,300 people. Marketo took a pop icon, played off of the lyrics to one of his hits, and included an asset download call-to-action in a way that really engaged a Facebook audience.

A great social post for lead generation has the following characteristics:

• Compelling messaging
• Eye-catching visuals
• Mass-audience appeal and shareability
• A clear CTA
• A tone that conveys personality

Getting the Most out of Facebook

Many marketers dismiss Facebook due to its perceived reputation as a personal social network. And although it may be true that Facebook is used to connect with family and friends, businesses can also tap into the huge value that Facebook offers. More than 800 million people use Facebook every day, so if you can show value for your followers, your lead-generation efforts can have a true network effect.

In order to become active on Facebook as a business, you need to create a Facebook Page for your company, if you haven’t done so already. Your Facebook Page should include an About section where you can write about your company. Be sure to include an interesting cover image and a profile photo.

Facebook enables businesses to “have a face” and interact with leads and customers on a more personal basis. But because Facebook is such a widely used personal social network, businesses need to strike a real balance between offering content that is valuable for brand positioning and offering content that is fun and shareable.

Ask yourself two questions before posting content on Facebook:

• Does this piece of content help our brand’s likability?
• Is this piece of content interesting, engaging, and useful?

Because of Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, posting for the sake of posting because you aren’t sure what message you want to convey can actually hurt your chances of being seen and followed. Facebook is constantly updating their platform and they continually try to improve the usability of News Feed. A couple of years ago, EdgeRank was all anyone talked about, but now it seems that EdgeRank is defunct.

Facebook has dropped the name EdgeRank and has created an even more complex algorithm. According to a recent Marketing Land article and interview with Facebook’s engineering manager for News Feed ranking, “Facebook hasn’t used the word (EdgeRank) internally for about two and a half years. That’s when the company began employing a more complex ranking algorithm based on machine learning. The current algorithm doesn’t have a catchy name, but it’s clear that EdgeRank is a thing of the past.”

But what does this algorithm do? It helps Facebook determine what gets displayed on a user’s News Feed. In simple terms, if users or their friends are interacting with your company on a frequent basis, you show up more frequently on their News Feeds. If not, you get dropped and will not appear. Thus, you want to ensure that you are part of the virtuous cycle of showing up on News Feeds with interesting topics to share.

Because engagement is critical to the News Feed, if your content is not shareable and being interacted with, it simply won’t show up. And if your content doesn’t show up in the News Feed, well, you won’t be getting many leads.

What do you have to keep in mind to stay relevant in Facebook’s News Feed? Here are some important things to think about:

• Affinity: How close is the relationship between the user and content?
• Weight: What type of action was taken on the content? A comment might have more weight than a Like, and so on.
• Decay: How current is the content?
• Post types: What type of posts does a user typically interact with?
• Hide post/spam: What type of posts does a user hide or mark as spam?
• Clicking on ads: Does a user interact with ads?
• Device considerations: Can the device a user is on handle certain types of content?
• Story bumping: Is it worthwhile to give old posts new visibility if people are still interacting with them?

Understanding engagement

When it comes to Facebook marketing, you can pay attention to two metrics in order to determine how effective your content is: the engagement rate and the People Talking About This rating.

Your engagement rate is used to measure what share of your audience is engaged with your content. It can easily be determined by the following two metrics:

• Engagement rate for posts: People who Liked, commented, shared or clicked on your post divided by people who saw your post
• Engagement rate for pages: Total engagements (which is the sum of all Likes, comments, and Shares) divided by total fans

By using these engagement metrics, you can determine whether the content you are posting is working, and you can compare the quality of different posts.

The other metric you can look at is the People Talking About This rating. Basically a buzz metric, this rating measures who is talking about you and your posts. This metric can be found right below your page name, as shown in Figure 9-1.

To boost these metrics, businesses need to make sure they are posting on a consistent basis and engaging in a dialogue with their followers.

Telling a visual story

Visual content is critical to engagement on social channels. Because Facebook’s News Feed is highly visual, businesses need to develop enticing images that their fans can Like and engage with. Images also bring your lead-generation CTAs to life and encourage more clicks. In fact, a recent HubSpot study found that photos on Facebook received 53 percent more Likes than the average post and 104 percent more comments. And to make it even more compelling for lead-generation enthusiasts, posts with an image received 84 percent more clicks than text-only posts.

So what sort of imagery can you use? Consider promoting a webinar with a custom image, like in Figure 9-2.

However, you must make sure that you follow Facebook’s imagery rules if you want to promote these posts, which is a must for lead generation. According to Facebook’s Help Center, “Images in your ads and sponsored stories may not include more than 20 percent text in the image.” Facebook believes that images with less text are more engaging for its audience.

You can see whether your image meets the guidelines by using Facebook’s Grid tool. To use the Grid tool,

1. Go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay.
2. Click Browse to upload an image you want to use in your ad.
3. After you upload your image, it appears within the 5 x 5 grid.
4. Click the boxes that contain text.

   If text is present in six or more boxes, the image has more than 20 percent text and is not eligible to be used in an ad in News Feed.

5. If your image has more than 20 percent text, adjust your image.

Figure 9-3 illustrates this rule so you can see how this works for ads without text, ads with the right amount of text, and ads with too much text.

Developing Promoted Posts

Through Facebook’s Promoted Posts, businesses can now further engage their followers and their followers’ networks by putting paid efforts behind their top posts. Promoted posts are fantastic for lead generation because they not only show up in the News Feeds of all of your fans, but they're also visible to their networks as well. Remember the iceberg analogy from earlier? This is a great example of tapping into the value of your followers’ networks.

Promoted Posts work well for businesses because they enable them to put that extra oomph behind posts they believe will generate the most impact and leads. Businesses can promote posts from their News Feeds, including status updates, photos, videos, and offers. Any post they promote appears higher in the News Feed and more people see it. Figure 9-4 shows an example of a Promoted Post appearing in my personal Facebook News Feed. It shows up in-line with my other updates.

Make sure that if you are using a Facebook Promoted Post, you have a good CTA — downloading a content asset, engaging in a contest or survey, signing up for a webinar, purchasing a product, and so on. And make sure your Promoted Posts have eye-catching imagery. This is critical to engagement.

But how much should you budget for a Facebook Promoted Post and what posts should you promote? Of course, this is all depends on your personal goals and objectives for lead generation through social channels, but according to Jay Baer, social media author and blogger, “If you’re at all serious about social marketing, and don’t have a line item budget for promoting Facebook posts, you need to add it today.” Facebook costs for Promoted Posts are based on your fan count and budget. They can range from $10 to $1,000 or more per post.

Jay also describes a method called STIR that he uses for his own blog, Convince and Convert, to determine what posts to promote:

• Shelf Life: Will the post be relevant four days from publication?
• Time: Has it been at least six hours since publication?
• Impact: Does the post include a link or other CTA that creates desirable customer behaviors (beyond a simple Like)?
• Results: Has the post exceeded a one-percent engagement rate since it has been posted?

Marketo, for example, promotes all posts that have a strong CTA and all content-related posts for brand exposure. They promote their blog posts every day, each new content asset, and anything else that has a strong CTA. Our formula for Promoted Posts is

A fun visual + clever messaging + strong CTA = Eye-Catching Promoted Post

Marketo has seen a huge uptick in visibility from promoting posts. For instance, they recently posted a new ebook about content marketing and spent $1,000 promoting it. The initial post reached only 1,712 people through organic results, but as a Promoted Post, it reached 27,744 people — a huge difference.

Creating sponsored stories

Facebook allows users to create two kinds of sponsored stories — stories that appear in the News Feed and stories that appear on the right side of the home page. Facebook defines sponsored stories as “messaging coming from friends about them engaging with a Page, app, or event that a business, organization, or individual has paid to highlight so there is a better chance people see them.” Figure 9-5 shows an example of a sponsored story in the News Feed. Note that this story highlights that a connection of mine likes this page.

Sponsored stories are a perfect example of leveraging the fact that people are more likely to engage with a company their friends are engaging with. It's called social validation.

Sponsored stories can also appear on the right side of the home page where the ads are located. Figure 9-6 shows an example.

Promoting through Facebook ads

Facebook ads provide highly targeted opportunities to reach your audience. On Facebook, your ads show up on the right side of the News Feed, making them highly visible. Facebook ads are similar to traditional pay-per-click (PPC) ads — you can place a bid for how much you are willing to pay per click, or you can pay per thousand people who will potentially see your ad. But as with Google, your cost depends on how popular your keywords are. Your ads can link to pages on your website or your Facebook page to ramp up the likes.

Facebook targets ads based on keywords within a user’s profile and her activity history on Facebook — what she has Liked and engaged with.

Here is a step-by-step guide on creating Facebook ads:

1. Go to the Facebook Ad tool at https://www.facebook.com/ads/create/.
2. Choose what you want to advertise — this could be anything from your own Facebook page to a blog post or a new product.

   For the purposes of this exercise, I am going to promote the Marketo Facebook page, as shown in Figure 9-7.

   

3. Next, choose what you want to do with your ad: Get More Page Likes or Promote Page Posts.

   I am going to choose the Get More Page Likes radio button.

4. Select an image for your ad by clicking Upload Image.

   Figure 9-8 shows Steps 3 and 4.

   

5. Create your ad headline, text, and landing view.

   The landing view is where people land on your page when they click your ad. I want them to land on the Timeline. This step also shows a preview of your ad on the right side, as shown in Figure 9-9.

   

6. Create an audience.

   I am choosing interests and a location. For my ad, I want people to be interested in the categories Marketo, software, application software, social medium automation, and desktop computer. I also want to narrow down my audience to include business and technology people. Take a look at Figure 9-10 as an example. I have 11 million in my defined audience so far.

7. Create a budget.

   For this ad, as shown in Figure 9-11, I want to pay $20 per day and run my campaign continuously, starting today. You can also include an end date if you want the campaign to end at a particular point in time.

   

   

Developing Facebook tabs

Facebook tabs are prime real estate because they live at the top of your page, are highly visible, and provide you with the opportunity to embed a landing page, or any other CTA you would like, directly into Facebook. Check out Figure 9-12 for an example of where Facebook tabs are located on your page.

After you click a tab, you can include any information you want. Because you can embed a landing page into these tabs, you can have a form appear within Facebook, which is perfect for your lead-generation efforts. Figure 9-13 shows an example of a tab created in Facebook for a content asset download. Notice that it has a visual banner, concise copy with bullet points, a short form, and a strong CTA. And because the landing page was created within the Marketo software application, leads that came directly from Facebook can be tracked.

Tracking your results

Facebook provides great analytics through their Page Insights. There you can track engagement and ad performance directly in their dashboard. Your Facebook Page Insights dashboard and Admin panel appear at the top of your Facebook company page. To dial down deeper into your analytics, click the See Insights button that appears on the top of your Admin panel.

The first overview Facebook provides is on your reach and engagement metrics. You can see your total Likes, the People Talking About This metric, and your Weekly Total Reach. Make note of whether these numbers are trending up or down — hopefully they're trending up! Figure 9-14 shows an example of this dashboard. The bottom line is Posts, the middle line is People Talking About This, and the top line is Weekly Total Reach.

You can also measure reach by demographics and location, as illustrated in Figure 9-15. You can see what countries, cities, and age groups you are most popular in.

Additionally, you can break down your People Talking About This metric even further by looking at the same demographics, as shown in Figure 9-16.

You can even dive down into the details of each post and look at how many engaged users you have, how many people are talking about each post, the reach, and the virality. This is important so you can compare and contrast how your content is performing on Facebook. Take a look at Figure 9-17, which shows an example of how Facebook breaks these details out.

Leveraging Twitter

In December 2013, Twitter announced it had 200 million active users, with an expected growth of 400 million users by the end of 2013. Companies that don’t have a Twitter strategy and a lead-generation plan are missing out on a huge opportunity. In fact, a recent study published by Mediabistro’s All Twitter found that 82 percent of leads generated through social media are referred from Twitter. They also found that Twitter outperforms LinkedIn and Facebook nine to one for lead generation. Twitter is a vibrant community where businesses can interact with leads and industry thought leaders to discuss hot topics and trends.

The beauty of Twitter is its real-time engagement, and because of the wide reach and the nature of the Twitter news feed, it gives businesses a great forum to get the word out to potential customers so they can discover and learn more about your company.

You can also have real-time conversations with your followers, which is a great opportunity for relationship-building. B2C companies do a great job at this, and B2B companies are quickly catching on. As an example, say there's a heat wave going on. Coca-Cola might tweet about the heat, a follower could tweet back that he is beating the heat with a nice cold bottle of Coca-Cola, and then Coca-Cola tweets back with a coupon code and a thank-you.

It is critical to follow the 4-1-1 rule when it comes to Twitter. There is so much going on that that you need to post often; however, you can’t be constantly posting your own stuff. (No one likes a narcissist, even in the online world.) Make sure you diversify your presence.

Like Facebook, Twitter also offers many opportunities for lead generation by both using their paid options and by simply adding links to your tweets.

Messaging through Twitter

I am not going to bore you with Twitter 101 here. I hope that you know that a tweet can’t be more than 140 characters and you have to craft a compelling message to engage your audience. You should use hashtags when applicable, you should include links to your download forms or assets, you should engage in retweets, and always respond to your audience.

That being said, how do you message for lead generation? There is a simple formula:

Compelling statement + clear CTA + hashtag + link = great lead-generating tweet

Take a look at a simple example from the Microsoft Twitter handle in Figure 9-18. They are asking for a pre-order of the new Surface tablet. It lets their followers know there is a pre-order available, it uses the hashtag #surface to help the tweet find a wider audience, it has a clear call-to-action asking followers to order theirs today, and it provides a link.

Building promoted posts in search and timeline

Twitter allows you to place promoted tweets in timelines targeted to followers and users who are similar to your followers. These are very similar to Promoted Posts on Facebook. You can take one of your standard tweets and promote it to add that extra boost. These tweets appear in both the timelines of your targeted audience and in search results.

Twitter enables you to target tweets based on the following:

• Interests
• Keywords in timeline
• Gender
• Geography
• Device
• Similarity to existing followers

Take a look at a promoted tweet that landed in my timeline from Salesforce in Figure 9-19 to promote their upcoming conference, Dreamforce. Notice that it has a similar formula to the previous Microsoft tweet. Also note that it says “Promoted by Salesforce.com,” so I know that it's a paid tweet. It also shows me who among my followers follows Salesforce. Again, it's some of that ol’ social validation in action.

Make sure your promoted tweets discuss timely and engaging content such as your new ebook, an event, or a new contest.

One tactic that I have seen work incredibly well is running promoted tweets during an event. Marketo always sees large spikes of activity on their Twitter page if they are attending an event or hosting it. By using promoted tweets, particularly in search results, during one of these high-traffic events, you can be part of these real-time conversations and take advantage of immediate opportunities.

Promoted tweets use a cost-per-click pricing similar to how Facebook ads and Google AdWords operates. Twitter recommends $0.50 to a maximum of $1.50 CPC.

As with any social media lead-generation tactic, make sure you have a dedicated landing page for your offer after a person clicks through.

Promoted accounts and trends

Twitter offers two other promoted ad options — promoted account and trends. A promoted account is just what it sounds like — you get to promote your account in order to gain more followers. The promoted account is featured in the Twitter search results in the Who to Follow area. The promoted accounts are chosen based on who users typically follow.

When someone searches for a keyword and Twitter sees that a user follows similar accounts to the advertisers, your promoted account can appear in their search results.

Take a look at Figure 9-20 to see what comes up in my Who to Follow section. I have Fidelity Investments because I track stock information, and Instagram and Tumblr because I like to track social media sites.

The other option is promoted trends, although a promoted trend has a hefty price tag of $200,000 attached to it, according to Mashable. What is a promoted trend? If you are a Twitter user, you probably know that on the left side of your home page, Twitter lists hashtags that are trending throughout the day. If you pay for a promoted trend, your hashtag can appear at the top of the list indicated by a promoted image.

Figure 9-21 shows an example of my Twitter trends. As you can see, most of the trends are related to current events and hot topics. At the top is a promoted trend for an upcoming football game between the Cleveland Browns and the Buffalo Bills. The idea is that a Twitter user sees this is trending and clicks the hashtag or engages with it in some way.

Configuring your Twitter Lead Generation Cards

Twitter Lead Generation Cards enable marketers to collect lead information directly from Twitter. A user can fill out his information quickly and securely and never leave Twitter — which is a huge plus for many users.

How do these handy Lead Generation Cards work? When someone expands your tweet, they can see the description of your offer and a strong CTA. The easy part is that the Twitter handle, name, and email address fields are already prepopulated with their information, so they don't have to do very much.

Twitter Lead Generation Cards also have the ability to sync with a marketing automation tool, so that you can keep your lead information all in one place.

However, note that the Lead Generation Cards only have a single full name field, and most marketing automation platforms collect names in separate first and last name fields. Twitter Lead Generation Cards also do not capture company data. Because of this difference, you cannot at this time push leads from your marketing automation tool to your CRM tool for sales follow-up. However, you can add them manually or upload a list.

Figure 9-22 shows an example Twitter Lead Generation Card. As you can see, there is a compelling image, a clear message, and a CTA. Note how Twitter prepopulates the user's information.

But don’t stop after someone fills out your card. Make sure to send a follow-up email to ensure that the lead has taken the correct action — that is, downloaded your ebook, for example. And as extra insurance, add the offer link in your email, just in case they didn't.

Tracking your results

Marketo uses Twitter as a large part of their social media lead-generation strategy. As a result, their average lead conversion rate is as high as 14 percent, and the cost-per-prospect is six times lower than that associated with some other marketing programs.

The key is making sure that your results are trackable. If you have a marketing automation tool, you can build landing pages and specialized links, so if a lead comes in from a social campaign, you can look at the campaign performance. You want to know what opportunities came in as a result of a social interaction, and whether social engagement affected an opportunity before it became a closed/won deal. You also might want to track the following elements of your campaigns:

• Follower growth
• Follower quality and engagement
• Reach (how many users favorite and retweet your tweets)
• Traffic to your website from Twitter
• Conversion (how many Twitter followers fill out your forms and buy your product or service)

You can track activity on your timeline using Twitter’s Tweet Activity dashboard to see all of your activity on Twitter, as in Figure 9-23. To get there, go to Settings, click the Ads Info link, and then go to the Analytics tab. Be sure to look for trends and optimize where you see opportunities. Twitter can also show you detailed demographic data so you can see who is clicking your posts and when.

For your ads, Twitter uses the standard metrics such as impressions, retweets, clicks, replies, and follows. You can view these in real time.

Engaging Through LinkedIn

LinkedIn remains the largest professional network with more than 161 million members in more than 200 countries. This is a great network of potential leads — particularly if you are in the B2B space. LinkedIn is perfect for networking and influencer-building opportunities, and they also offer sponsored updates and LinkedIn ads for your lead-generation efforts. And what’s more, most LinkedIn users visit the site for pure business purposes — to connect with like-minded professionals, to read industry news, and to connect with their favorite companies. So unlike personal social sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn lends itself well to making business connections. As a result, LinkedIn is the perfect place to showcase your thought leadership and become known as an industry expert.

Building out and optimizing your company page

The first step to optimizing your presence for lead generation is to make sure that your company page is built-out and optimized. The company page tells a user who you are, what you do, and why they should follow you. Keep in mind the following best practices when working to develop your LinkedIn page with lead generation in mind:

• Make sure your company page is well optimized for keywords. People will be searching by using those terms, and you want to make sure that you show up.
• Work towards a daily posting sequence to establish brand positioning on LinkedIn.
• Your company page will have the opportunity to add to and optimize your tabs such as Products and Careers. To do so, simply click the blue Edit button to edit your page and add any copy, images, or videos you want.
• Add videos to your Products tab to further engage followers. Keep the content professional (of course!) and know what specific takeaway you want the viewer to get from watching the video.

I particularly like how Apple presents itself on LinkedIn, as shown in Figure 9-24. They have a crisp, clean image up-top with a compelling message that resonates with me — I can recall how many times my dog has gotten tangled in my computer cords! They also have a section that includes keywords and a variety of updates.

Joining and starting LinkedIn Groups

Engaging in conversations with professionals is what LinkedIn is all about, and LinkedIn Groups do a nice job of facilitating conversations. This is where you and your sales team (who should all be active on LinkedIn) can answer questions, pose questions, and post links to your thought leadership.

It is simple to do a keyword search to find the top industry groups. The results are ranked by group activity, so be sure to join the most active ones. Also, feel free to start your own. If you spend time and give valuable information in your groups, your company will soon be known as a great source of information and will ultimately attract connections. Remember that posting in these groups is important, but engaging is vital. Make sure to add value in your responses to each conversation.

To create a Group, simply go to Interests on the top navigation and click on Groups. Then you can create a Group by clicking the yellow Create a Group button. After you create your Group, you can add information like your logo, Group name, description, and member settings — such as whether you want to approve people before they can join or whether people can automatically join. After you have created your Group, moderate it and answer comments daily.

Also, be sure you are participating in Q&A by doing a search in LinkedIn Answers for relevant topics and then subscribing to the answer feed to further establish your credibility.

Leveraging LinkedIn Sponsored Updates

Just like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn has upped the ante for lead generation by offering LinkedIn Sponsored Updates. Through LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, you can promote your message on your followers’ feeds and to those outside of your follower network. You can also target who sees your update, making Sponsored Updates even more effective. As with any lead-generation update, you need a compelling image, an engaging message, and a strong CTA.

LinkedIn allows you to target your updates based on

• Location
• Company name
• Job title
• Skills
• School name
• Group (if they are part of a particular group)
• Gender
• Age

Sponsored Updates also allow you to exclude options. For example, if you are targeting CMOs and want to make sure marketing managers aren’t seeing your message, you can exclude the title marketing manager.

Figure 9-25 shows an example on my personal LinkedIn news feed from New Relic. It gives me the opportunity to follow New Relic on LinkedIn, Like the post, comment on it, or share it. Their CTA is to a recent blog post.

Like other ad forms, you can choose your budget and decide whether you want to pay cost-per-click (CPC) or cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM).

To post a Sponsored update, go through the following steps:

1. Click Business Services in the top navigation of your LinkedIn home page and then click Advertise.
2. In the Campaign Manager, click Get Started, which brings you to the LinkedIn ad creation interface. Then click Sponsored Update.
3. From there, you can name your campaign, choose the update you want to sponsor, and target your update.
4. After you have determined your update specifics, you can determine your cost model, daily budget, and start and stop date for your update.

Setting up LinkedIn ads

LinkedIn ads are a powerful way for companies to target very specific profiles not found in other advertising and social platforms. Because of LinkedIn’s focus on professional networking, the data available maps nicely to the lead data you are probably looking for, such as geography, industry, job title, company, LinkedIn group membership, and other demographic targeting.

As with the other social channels, you can set your own budget through pay-per-click or impressions. You can also stop your ads anytime if they aren’t working for you, so that gives you the flexibility to test.

LinkedIn also gives you many options to control the look and feel of your ad, including text only, image, and video ads. According to LinkedIn, an image can help your ad get up to 20 percent more clicks, so keep that in mind.

To set up a LinkedIn ad, take the following steps:

1. Go to https://www.linkedin.com/ads/ and click Get Started.
2. Under what type of campaign you would like to create, click the box labeled Create an Ad.
3. Next, as shown in Figure 9-26, name your campaign, decide on ad variation, add an image or a video as indicated in the Media Type drop-down list, and create your copy where it says Click to Enter a Headline and Click to Enter Description of up to 75 Characters.

   You can also see a preview of your ad on the right side of your screen.

   

4. After you have completed everything, click Next and choose your target audience by location, company, job title, school, skills, group, gender, and age, as shown in Figure 9-27.

   

5. The last step is choosing your budget — either CPC or per 1,000 impressions.

   Here you can also choose how long LinkedIn will run your ad and whether you want lead collection (enabling functionality for a lead to request contact from a company representative). When you are finished, click Save Changes and Checkout. Figure 9-28 shows these final steps.

   

Building Your Google+ Presence

Although there is much debate over Google+’s actual active user data, which they cite at close to 400 million users, we know one thing for sure: Google+ has an impact on search results. Because Google+ is the social network of the biggest search giant, it's natural that search and Goggle+ go hand-in-hand. Because of Google+’s +1s and author rank, Google+ is a must-have for any lead-generation marketer looking to be high in organic search rankings.

Google+ also offers interesting and unique avenues for engagement with leads and followers — including Google+ Hangouts, where you can set up a live telecast between multiple people.

Acknowledging the relationship between Google+ and search engine optimization (SEO)

The critical element about Google+ for lead generation is the clear benefits the social channel has on search results. The first step to start reaping the benefits of Google+’s impact on SEO is enabling Google Authorship for your content via AuthorRank. What is AuthorRank? It takes into account social signals and content authority so that search engines can give smarter, more relevant results. Long gone are the days of keyword stuffing, which flooded the Internet with mediocre, often worthless, content. Useless content reflects poorly on Google’s ability to immediately deliver relevant content to a search. Google is now looking at deeper signals that your site is an educational authority. You must link all of your content to your business Google+ page and have influential individuals from your company claim ownership of this content. The kicker is that you must have a Google+ account to enable Google Authorship.

Take a look at Figure 9-29, which shows an example of what Google Authorship looks like when it comes up in Google’s organic search results. I did a search for lead generation. Marketo comes up on the first page of search results, with an image of Jon Miller, Marketo's cofounder. Jon has claimed Google Authorship of this content.

To set up Google Authorship, take the following actions:

1. Go to your Google+ business page and your personal profile (you need to have a Google+ personal profile).
2. Let Google know you are a content author by signing into your Google+ profile, going to the About tab, and adding links to the Contributor To section by clicking the Edit button, as shown at the bottom of Figure 9-30.

   

3. From your content management system (CMS), such as WordPress, Drupal, or SilverStripe, link to your Google+ page by adding rel="author" in the link, as shown in a Kissmetrics example in Figure 9-31.

   You can download an SEO plug-in for most CMSs that you can use to add your Google Authorship. You can set up Google Authorship for both your blog and website content.

   If you are using WordPress for your blog, for a user to claim authorship, go to the user’s profile and select Edit. Under the Contact Info section, you will see an area to enter your Google+ URL. Because you have already linked your profile to your content, your authorship will be set up.

   The other important factor that Google takes into account from Google+ is the +1 button. This is fairly simple. Embed the +1 button on your site and blog. (See Chapter 8 if you need a refresher on how to add a +1 button.) When someone +1s your post or page, it shows up in Google search results. In fact, according to a study conducted by HubSpot, websites with a +1 get 3.5 times more visits on their Google+ page, which of course helps with organic search results.

   

Getting noticed with Google+ Hangouts

The other cool aspect of Google+ is the Hangout functionality. A Google+ Hangout allows you to essentially “hang out” with anyone anywhere and broadcast it live over your Google+ profile. Think of the Google+ Hangout as a casual live event, but online. You can invite your followers to attend and promote your event, just as you would any other webinar. Google+ Hangouts show value in the following ways:

• Content: You can use the Google+ Hangout recording for additional content on your website and for your lead-generation campaigns.
• SEO: The more people who engage with and share your content on Google+, the more likely it is to show up high in organic search results. You can also get additional +1s and engagement if your Hangout is fresh and relevant.
• Thought leadership: One of the best ways to leverage a Google+ Hangout is to do a panel interview or interview with an influencer in your space, a thought leader in your company, or even partners and customers.

Getting Visual with Pinterest

Depending on your business, Pinterest can work wonders as a lead-generation machine. Because the platform is inherently visual, if you sell a product of some sort, Pinterest can be a gold mine. Even B2B companies shouldn’t discount it because (hopefully) their content strategy overall is becoming more visual. Pinterest lends itself perfectly to blogs, infographics, slide decks, and more.

Currently, Pinterest does not have paid promotions (although at the time of this writing, they have announced plans to add native advertising). Closely watch how much time you spend on this channel for lead-generation purposes, as it still has not yet been proven, particularly for B2B. You don’t want to waste time on a channel that might not have much value for you.

For instance, B2C businesses have seen tremendous growth from Pinterest — particularly the fashion, food, and home décor business. If you are selling clothing, you might have multiple Pinterest boards showing off hot new clothing lines. For B2B, it gets trickier. However, you should have a presence on Pinterest because it raises brand awareness and visibility, which is a must for lead generation.

Pinning your top assets

Hopefully you have a good amount of visual content in your arsenal by now. (If you don't, I hope you're starting to think about it now that I've been beating the idea of visual content into your head for the past 100 pages!)

You should be posting the following asset types on Pinterest:

• Infographics
• Visual slide decks
• Ebooks
• Memes and funny images
• Useful collateral pieces
• Blog posts
• Humor
• Product images and photos
• How-tos

Figure 9-32 shows an example of a Pinterest board.

You can link your image to a chosen website page you want people to go to. For example, if you pin an image of your latest ebook, you can link it right to your ebook landing page.

Promoting your events through images

Another great way to leverage Pinterest is by showcasing images at an event you are attending. Whether it's a fashion show or a tradeshow, you can capture images of key attendees, vendors, and other exciting happenings at an event. You can even have a board showcasing everything related to an event, such as invites, contests, and more. Figure 9-33 illustrates a Pinterest board from Salesforce that showcases their visual guide to Dreamforce, a large tradeshow. They highlight things to do in San Francisco, nearby hotels, a survival kit, and so on.

For a B2C example, take a look at Martha Stewart Living’s Pinterest board for Gardening Tips & Ideas in Figure 9-34. As you can see, Martha Stewart does a wonderful job compiling gardening ideas and innovations. She also successfully captures her brand by providing easy do-it-yourself activities for her followers.

Showcasing your company culture

Because Pinterest works so well with candid images to show the human side of a brand, use Pinterest to tell your leads who you are as a company. Never discount the power of showing your humanity to a lead. Today’s buyer is looking to create a relationship with his vendor. He needs to buy into your company as much as he needs to buy into your product or service. So use Pinterest as a way to show off your company culture, flair, and humor.

Take a look at Salesforce’s Pinterest boards in Figure 9-35. They take a very cool approach to the platform and have boards that show off the San Francisco lifestyle, Salesforce office styles, why their employees love working at Salesforce, candid shots around the office, and more. In fact, the majority of their Pinterest boards are about company culture instead of showing off their product suite. Clearly, Salesforce sees Pinterest as a great opportunity to showcase who they are as company — and leads appreciate the transparency.

Attracting Attention with SlideShare

SlideShare (www.slideshare.net/) was acquired by LinkedIn in May 2013 and is a community for sharing presentations like PowerPoint, videos, and webinars. The site has 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million page views. SlideShare also offers built-in lead-generation capabilities through embedded forms that can sync to your marketing automation platform.

You can upload slide decks, infographics, ebooks, webinars, and more onto the SlideShare platform. Because it's built as a social network for information sharing, you should treat it as an educational community. SlideShare also features popular assets on their home page for additional exposure.

You should strive to have a slide deck created for SlideShare about once per quarter. Not only because the quality of leads from SlideShare are so strong, but also because you can take an asset and, by repurposing the content in a visual way, give it additional lift.

For instance, Marketo created an ebook a couple of years ago called Amplify Your Impact: How to Multiply the Effects of Your Inbound Marketing Programs. The ebook did pretty well, with more than 13,000 views. Marketo then created a visual slide deck from the same content, which got 339,000 views on SlideShare — a pretty significant amount. The result was 4,482 new leads from this asset and 8,519 total downloads of the ebook. Marketo spent $4,620 developing the visual content, which amounted to a cost of about $1 per new lead.

Optimizing SlideShare for SEO

SlideShare offers prime real estate to brand your channel and optimize it for SEO. You can add a featured presentation, upload a custom template, offer social sharing capabilities, and tag each presentation with keywords. And in some cases, creating presentations that rank for certain keywords can be easier than ranking a blog post.

Be sure to include keyword-rich titles, descriptions, and tags to each presentation so that your deck ranks both inside SlideShare and on Google itself. Figure 9-36 shows what happens when you search for the term visual content marketing in Google. Marketo also created another visual SlideShare deck on visual content marketing. They optimized it for search results, so you can see it appear on the first page of Google search results. The first organic search result is on Marketo's website and the second one is from SlideShare.

Another benefit is that SlideShare allows users to embed presentations into other people’s sites, which is great because that equals an inbound link.

Collecting leads through forms

SlideShare’s lead-generation capabilities really stand out when it comes to collecting lead data. SlideShare has the ability to embed a lead-generation form directly into your presentation at the end. If you enable that feature, the form pops up after your presentation, and viewers can enter their information if they want to download the presentation for later viewing or learn more about your company.

Figure 9-37 shows an example of this form. As you can see, the form asks the viewer for first name, last name, work email, phone, and company.

You can either export these leads and add them to your CRM, or if you have a marketing automation platform, sync directly with SlideShare, if your software has that capability. This way, your leads get directly into your database and you can trigger alerts based on keywords that indicate buyer behavior.