Understated Or Overrated: Should You Rely Solely On Social Media For Lead Generation?

With an increasing amount of businesses using social media within their marketing strategy, it’s clear to see that for the most part social media platforms work as a fun and engaging tool for promoting your company, showing off products or services and even to develop your brand identity. 

However, with social media giants like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram constantly changing their algorithms in order to limit how much reach your promotional posts have and more focusing being placed on paid ads and promoted posts, social media is becoming much more difficult to crack in terms of lead generation. 

For those using social media as a cheap and easy platform for marketing, this increased focus on paid for social media posts can prove to be detrimental, with the posts being pushed further down the list, in favour of those who’s budget is used effectively within social media adverts and promoted posts. 

Social media has, and continues to, play a huge role in everyday society, making it a vital tool for businesses and something that you never be ignored, it is important to figure out how you can best utilise your social media accounts, gain an understanding of how social media can be best be used for your business and how you can use it alongside other marketing tools.  

But Why Shouldn’t I Rely On Social Media Alone?

Despite it’s benefits, relying on social media alone to generate sales and leads isn’t the most effective way to boost your business and doing so could actually be generating less results than expected. Let’s take a look at 3 important reasons you shouldn’t solely be relying on social media marketing to see results.

Paid Content Is Only Going To Increase 

It seems obvious that the days of organic reach have passed and the time for paid content is here. While organic content may never completely disappear, it’s likely that as social media platforms become even more focused on growing their own profits, they’re going to be looking to businesses to pay for their content, something that is likely to cause small businesses huge problems. 

While businesses shouldn’t abandon social media, it’s going to be important to shift your focus. By posting your organic content to show off your products, company or to share engaging content with your followers, alongside more paid for promotional content, you can still use organic posts on social media but without damaging your reach.  

You Don’t Own Social Media Platforms 

Might be an obvious one, but you don’t own your social media, meaning that any changes that happen on these platforms are out of your hands. From algorithm to interface changes happen to social media platforms everyday, whether you notice or not, which is an important factor to consider. If you’re relying solely on social media for lead generation, if any big changes happen which could lead to people being unable to, or not wanting to use the platform anymore, there go your leads.

By working to spend your social media focus on attracting audiences and taking them to your website or even onto your mailing list, then you’re customers are away from the distractions that are available on social media platforms and focused 100% on your business, your products and your services and what you offer, rather than the content around them on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.  

You Can’t Reach Everyone 

It might seem like that in 2017 everybody seems to have or want access to at least Facebook, but surprisingly there are many people out there who don’t use social media, in fact there are still thousands of people out there who have no interest in using social media platforms, especially when it comes to trusting a business. By relying on social media alone you could be missing out on a huge percentage of people who might otherwise have been interested in your business. 

With other marketing techniques you can increase your reach to those who use the internet in other ways, for searching on Google or for watching videos on Youtube. Expanding your reach to other parts of the internet can not only help your brand grow it’s visibility but also increase your credibility, showing that you care about all your customers and visitors, social media users or otherwise. 

What Other Marketing Tools Should I Consider? 

One of the biggest appeals of social media is that it’s often cheap, if not free, meaning that those with a smaller budget can utilise it, however there are still other marketing tools out there that can be great for your business, including the following; 

• Search Engine Optimisation
• Email Marketing 
• Pay Per Click Advertising  
• Video Content 
• Blogs 
• Landing Pages

All in all, social media can be an effective marketing tool, however it takes more than a social media presence in order to be successful. An over-reliance on social media and unwillingness to consider other forms of marketing can often be counter productive for businesses, in some cases actually limiting reach and making businesses seem much smaller than they are. 

With competition online fiercer than ever before, it’s important for businesses have an all round established online presence, not just a website and a few social media pages. While social media can work fine for generating leads, investing time and money into a compelling, well planned and optimised digital marketing strategy is a much more effective way to not only generate those important leads but also reflects your brand as a leader, a solid brand and as a company who takes what they do seriously.