Rumor has it that social listening can help you find leads — is it true or false?
It’s true, of course! Social listening is the perfect way to discover new marketing and sales leads online.
Today everybody’s posting their thoughts and experiences on social media. So it’s easy to spot people in need of your products and services. All you have to do is (social) listen.
You’re reading now the best guide for this. Below, we explain four practical ways you should use your social listening tool to spot leads and we offer useful tips for better results.
Table of Contents
How social listening helps in discovering leads
First things first, social listening is the process of tracking your brand, competitors, and industry on social media and analyzing all these mentions to extract actionable insights.
With social listening insights, you can inform your strategies and make data-driven decisions for product development, new marketing campaigns, and more.
However, having collected all these mentions in one place can help you find leads as well.
So, social listening is more than a strategy tool. It’s a lead-generation solution too, as it helps you identify users already interested in your offerings, unsatisfied competitor’s customers, and potential influencers who might benefit from promoting your products or services.
Let’s explain this in specific.
4 ways in which social listening can help you find leads
If you want to find leads by listening to social media conversations, implement the following tactics and you’re all set for success.
1. Discover people asking questions about your offerings
Perhaps the most basic feature of social listening tools is the most efficient one when it comes to discovering new leads. We talk about tracking all brand mentions.
By keeping track of them across social networks you can spot posts where people ask questions about your offerings. Even if they haven’t tagged your official accounts.
These leads are most likely in the consideration stage of the funnel and look for more information to make up their mind.
How to do it
Set up your trackers to monitor all social media for your brand name and variations. These variations can be common misspellings — e.g. Mentionlytic instead of Mentionlytics.
Don’t forget to add your product or service special names, e.g. Frappuccino of Starbucks.
Also, track your branded hashtags as users tend to use them instead of tagging your official accounts.
What to do next
Respond to these mentions promptly. Offer helpful information or your assistance.
That’s how you can move these potential customers down the funnel.
2. Keep track of unsatisfied customers of your competition
Well, for this one you might need a tool with robust sentiment analysis.
Sentiment analysis is essential for social listening as it categorizes social mentions into positive, negative, or neutral. It’s a basic feature of most social listening tools.
Thus, you can see what your audience loves and hates about your brand and your competitors!
How to do it
Set up your trackers to monitor your competitors’ brand names, products, and services.
Then, apply the “negative mentions” filter in your tool to view only the posts with negative feedback about your competition.
And ta-da! You’ve got a list of leads already interested in what you offer. And more willing to try out your solution!
AI-powered Sentiment Analysis
Mentionlytics AI Sentiment Analysis is one of the features users love the most. Want to get a taste of it?
What to do next
Reach out to these unsatisfied customers of your competitors with personalized messages.
Tap into their pain point and offer your help or even better an incentive to get their attention.
3. Jump into industry conversations to introduce your products/service
This method is mainly for feeding your funnel with new leads in the awareness stage.
Listening to social media conversations on hot industry topics offers you a lot of opportunities for lead generation. Especially, if you track conversations about customer pain points.
You can join these conversations and offer your expert tips and solutions to their problems, introducing your offerings to a wide audience. Some people will definitely get interested!
How to do it
Except for your branded keywords, track also industry-specific keywords with your tool.
These keywords can be:
- Customer pain points
- Hot topics in your niche
- Popular relevant hashtags
And anything else, of course!
Check out the mentions of these industry keywords regularly to spot conversations that you should jump into.
What to do next
Join these conversations by offering a tip or your opinion. Introduce your product/service as the solution but be careful. You shouldn’t be too promotional or salesy in public comments.
Try to genuinely add value to the conversations.
4. Reach out to influencers interested in what you do
This is not a direct way to find leads through your social listening tool but hear us out.
Influencers are the backbone of the social media world. And if you want to generate leads through social platforms you will need their good graces.
What social listening can do for that is help you discover influencers in your niche. We don’t mean a bunch of celebrities that will charge you a fortune for a post.
We talk about niche content creators and thought leaders with a tight community.
These accounts may not have a large following but, as Adweek says, nano-influencers are most likely to give you higher ROI than celebrities.
How to do it
For this, you’ll need to use a tool that categorizes all your mentioners — users who have posted about your brand or industry keywords — based on their following.
For example, with Mentionlytics Top Mentioners feature you can have a list of them in no time.
This feature gathers all users mentioning the keywords you track and ranks them based on three criteria: follower count, number of mentions (how many times they have mentioned your keywords), and engagement.
What to do next
Select which of these influencers could be a good match for your brand. Examine their profiles, interactions, and content to see if they actually align with your business and offerings.
Then, reach out and forge collaborations!
Practical tips for effective lead generation through social listening
So, how can you improve your social listening process to find suitable leads for your business? We’ve got some tips to help you.
Focus on your direct competitors
If you want to find qualified leads, already knowing what problems your product and service solve, focus your social listening efforts on direct competitors.
Don’t waste time tracking mentions of businesses that don’t do exactly what you do. Their unsatisfied customers won’t match your buyer persona.
Receive notifications for new brand mentions
Set up real-time alerts for branded keywords on social media to avoid missing warm leads.
With Mentionlytics you can receive a notification instantly whenever a user mentions your brand.
Thus, you can glance at it and see if it’s a sales opportunity.
Track relevant hashtags
Tracking important hashtags is a must for discovering leads.
First, monitoring branded hashtags helps you stay on top of brand mentions. It’s common for users to post about your brand using #yourbrandname instead of tagging your account.
But, most importantly, tracking industry keywords can help you engage in industry conversations. Thus, you can increase your reach to more potential customers.
Find new leads with Mentionlytics for free
To wrap it up, it’s true that social listening can help you find leads. But theory can get you so far. It’s time to dip your toes into this process.
With Mentionlytics you can do it at no cost!
Sign up for a free 14-day trial now and find new leads for your business today!
