Doing B2b Digital Marketing is a constant search for new and fresh leads to fuel your sales engine.

In this article, we will give you a fresh take on how to use Social Media to get new leads and prospects. You probably already know all about how to use LinkedIn to do so. So we looked beyond Linkedin and have found nine new creative ways for you to create fresh leads for your B2b business.

Does getting B2B Social media leads means staying on their platforms?

One of the core discussions when it comes to B2b Lead generations is if you should operate within their platform or if you should collect the leads from their platform.

If we take a perspective where we take two steps back and look at the real question here, then it is who should own and control the customer data in your prospecting funnel. You or the Social media provider.

If that was the only element in the discussion, then we would all agree that it is always better to control and own data yourself instead of having others own the data in a gated content set-up.

Owning the data means that you control it and that it can be used across your business in the ways that make the most sense to you.

The reasons we don’t all go for this approach have mostly to do with practicality, laws, and regulations.

It can be technically challenging to fetch the data from Social Media sites; in some cases, it is also illegal for you to do so.

Finally, it can also be difficult to get the part of the customer data that you need to be able to start a sales process; phone numbers and e-mail dresses, because they will seldomly be publically available. Also, users might be using aliases that do not reflect their real personal names,

We will not elaborate more on the above but bring the different elements into play when we go through your options with the various Social Media Channels.

We will however let you for each of the nine cases if it is a feasible way to try to collect the lead data from the social media source.

The nine social media cases we have selected are:

Facebook groups

Reddit Forums

Slack Groups

Product Hunt

Twitter

Quora

Instagram

Tiktok

Discord servers

How to select the right Social media leads sources

You cannot build a social media strategy by using all of the social media platforms on the list. You need to focus on the channels that support how you sell your product or services the best. If you sell software to start-ups then Product Hunt is a great nice site. If you don’t, it will be hard to generate leads on this platform.

In other words, as b2b marketers you need to focus on the best fit and invest time and effort in getting the most out of the brand position that you have, to make your marketing strategy as efficient as possible.

Facebooks specialist groups

We all know LinkedIn groups. Many are quite big and are most often used for promotion. Either as self-promotion by the group owner or as easy marketing channels for the members. The result is that users that seek true engagement among peers seek other channels. One such option is Facebook Group, It is very fair to assume that for each LinkedIn group you know, there is a corresponding Facebook group.

The quality of the groups can vary, but you can find groups with an engaged community that interacts on a high level here.

Such groups can be a great place to meet prospects for your business. It requires that you engage and build a personal brand in the community. You will do this by giving tips and Trix engaging in conversation with group members. It is all about building trust and good reputations. This can then lead to a general interest in the business that you are in.

Facebook users always use their real names, so it can be possible to collect Facebook leads and engage with them on Forums outside of Facebook. However you will need a tool to find their contact information.

Reddit Forums

In the same way that your prospects could be found on Facebook Groups, they could also be found on the Reddit forum. There is a tendency there the Reddit forum to be more engaged and have a higher sense of community than what can be experienced on the average Facebook page.

Users on Reddit almost never use a real name, so collecting leads to be used outside Reddit will not work.

Slack Groups

Digital Marketers and developers can be found on Slack groups. However, the culture here is not to sell or be sold to. So aggressive sales and marketing will most likely backfire. In other words, the aim here is not to generate leads or to sell a product or service. It is to build a relationship.

Product Hunt

Product Hunt is not a social media site as such but the dynamics are the same. Here you can find tech-oriented users. Most of them have a digital profile, either in sales, marketing, or as developers.

Users tend to use their real names on the platform, so they can be collected if you prefer to contact them outside the Product Hunt platform.

Twitter

Twitter is great for the engagement of potential customers.

The drawbacks of using Twitter for B2b lead generation are that the attention span is short and it is not really in the platform’s DNA to engage in 1-1- conversions. Also, users most often do not use their real names, so collecting leads to use used outside the platform probably not will be very useful to you.

Quora

Quora is a social question and answer site that helps users get answers to any kind of question they have. Anyone can post a question and will get an answer fairly quickly. They have more than 300 million active users. So the traffic to the site is huge. This also means that you can use it for social media lead generation.

There will be a question on Quora that relates to your business. It makes it possible for you to build a domain authority profile on the site. This will take time, but such a profile can be able to generate leads for our business. There are in fact cases where a b2b business gets most of its customers from Quora referrals.

Instagram

Instagram is a visual social media site with a strong consumer focus. So why would you use this to get b2b leads? The answer is what is known as reverse engineering. This means, that some businesses that sell to end-users are very active on Instagram.

It means that b2b companies that target companies that have a strong presence on Instagram can use this platform to their advantage. The logic being if they are strong on Instagram, then they are doing something right and could possibly also be potential customers for your business.

Tiktok

The same logic that works in the Instagram example works for Tikok too. This is also an end-user channel, but your b2b leads can be found here too. Meaning the ones that are active on Tiktok

Discord servers

It is becoming more and more common to use Discord serves to host communities of all kinds. It can be a great place to interact, especially if your target audience is younger and has an interest in tech and gaming.

Conclusion – B2B lead generation

In this article, we have analyzed nine different social media platforms, that lets you do social media marketing, and generate b2b leads. The nine social media channels help you get qualified leads in different ways.

What must decide what you should choose would be the type of business you are in and where your prospects would be most active.

What are the B2b lead generation alternatives?

Before we end this post, some reflections on the alternative to getting b2b lead from the nine different areas. What you could do instead would be: Create brand awareness, content marketing, Blog posts, Facebook ads, paid social, paid ads and create new landing pages. All of this takes time and/or costs money.

So there are no shortcuts to getting B2b leads. This means it might seem like a lot of effort that you need to put into the different platforms, but your alternatives are also costly. It is all up to what kind of marketing strategy and lead generation strategy you choose to follow.