Nonprofit Performance 360 Magazine Vol 5 No 1

Leveraging Social Media & Viral Marketing for Lead Generation JEFFREY MAGEE

C onnecting where your market lives is a critical success factor for keeping your name, brand, or offer top-of-mind in the prospect pool and client base. We learned decades ago that location is a major and compelling factor for marketing and positioning. Now companies like Facebook, Pinterest, and Amazon teach us that location means the space you occupy in the social media world of your market. Keeping yourself relevant for that market, and leveraging it for lead generation and more business, is the new multiplier for development and expansion. While many traditional platforms of marketing, canvassing, calling, and selling remain the same, some distribution channels for reaching the market have evolved. We have learned from Millennials and Generation Z that, whatever your organization, applying social media platforms and accelerated connectivity is the new rule for engaging the mind-share and movement of markets. While your organization may have dedicated personnel and assets in social media and viral marketing, the actual client contact person must occupy this space on an even greater micro level. Be more organic and make it fit your personality to leverage your advocates. The possibilities are endless and, while requiring little additional effort on your behalf, can become your best way to reach mass markets with no additional cost.

Social media is great for brand building, brand awareness, and building a following, but it seldom translates into immediate transactions, so remain focused on the complete connection process. To increase your market mind-share, explore these ideas and allow your own creative juices to flow to reveal even more powerful strategies and tactics for making your mark on the marketplace. 1. Connect your Facebook account with your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts and any other pertinent social media accounts, so that when you send a brief action-oriented message or update to one account, it replicates across every account. 2. Remember that it takes at least seven relevant social media messages, alerts, and updates to capture a person’s attention. 3. When you are meeting with a high- profile contact with leverage on others you are attempting to attract, tweet about it. Utilize instant communication platforms to inform your market and potential prospects where you are and when you will be somewhere. For example,when you have an informational booth or table at a job fair or business networking event, send out continuous

updates to let others know to come by and see you or join in the fun.When you are meeting with influential others, have them duplicate your efforts and tweet to their followers about you, telling them to stop by. 4. Allow people to join you when you may be meeting socially with others. Make this a conversational community. 5. If you are at an event where there is signage or something visual that can spread your message without you having to type or say it, shoot a picture and tweet it, and post it to Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, and your own website. In the picture, tag and identify everything that can have magnetic appeal with others in the social media search world. 6. If you have just made a contact,share that through the words of the client to your Facebook page, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, your website, and tweet it. 7. Every transaction is a moment to share and have the customer (new client using your services, new member joining your organization, new donor or sponsor, etc.) do the same for their followers. This is about mass expansion to your market space and the other person’s followers and contacts.

28 I Nonprofit Performance Magazine