Don’t Get Sucked Into Social Media Hype!

Everyone's like sheep on social media; like, one person starts making noise, and everyone's like, 'Hey, yeah!' and then you got a whole bunch of people making noise at you.

Earl Sweatshirt

It always amazes me when I see headlines like the ones below:

• More than 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn

• Become a marketing superstar by generating leads with social media

• Tapping into social media can transform your lead generation

That’s all fine and well but these headlines don’t tell the real story. In fact social media is the least effective way to generate B2B leads. According to www.placester.com this diagram demonstrates the most effective methods for generating B2B leads.

 

                                                                                           

As you can see, social media effectively generates leads 5% of the time. So, LinkedIn accounts for 80% of 5% - Big Whoop! How much time and effort are you wasting on social media platforms when you could actually be devoting your efforts on strategies that may actually work? To add insult to injury there is a whole cottage industry of companies out there who (for a fee of course) will show you how to improve your LinkedIn profile, how to get more LinkedIn connections, etc. Have you been sucked in?

The reality is that social media doesn’t work as a B2B lead generation tool and LinkedIn is still no more than Mecca for recruiters. Would you really have invested your time and effort into attempting to generate leads on LinkedIn if you knew that the headlines were all deceptive and the rate of effectiveness was 80% of 5%?

Speaking of LinkedIn, I came across this article by Robert Hennessey. The study surveyed 200 B2B marketing professionals in the U.S. who were screened based on their experience with various lead generation channels, tactics and metrics. The study was conducted by lead generation technology reviewer Software Advice a Gartner company. Here are the highlights of the study:

• Marketers found trade shows, referral marketing and in-house email marketing to be the best channels for generating large numbers of high-quality leads

• Videos were not only the most-used type of content (used by 92%); they were most commonly cited as producing a very high volume of leads

• Most B2B marketers (79%) use at least 11 different marketing software applications, with 97% using email marketing software

Don’t get sucked into social media hype and don’t be seduced by salacious headlines. Do your homework and make sound business decisions.

Social media has given us this idea that we should all have a posse of friends when in reality, if we have one or two really good friends, we are lucky.

Brene Brown

Make someone smile today.

Geri