LinkedIn three times more effective for lead generation than Facebook & Twitter

Rebecca Corliss, (@repcor), a PR and marketing manager at HubSpot, shared last week that ‘LinkedIn is 277% More Effective for Lead Generation Than Facebook & Twitter.’

Social media can be a huge contributor to a company’s lead generation efforts in both B2B and B2C. But how efficient are the various different social channels in directly driving leads? In a recent study of over 5,000 businesses, HubSpot found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%, almost 3 times higher (277%) than both Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%). LinkedIn’s conversion rate also outranked social media as a channel overall. In other words, of all the traffic that came to these business’ websites via social media, .98% of that traffic converted into leads, compared to LinkedIn’s 2.74%.

Why is LinkedIn so effect for lead generation per Corliss.

People join LinkedIn to showcase their career, work expertise, and find content and information to make their professional lives better. So businesses who target other businesses will naturally find a higher concentration of their target market on LinkedIn. Also, when someone visits LinkedIn, the person is most likely in a business-focused mindset, helping business’ content perform inherently better.

And in the case of B2C-focused businesses?

Less content is generally posted to LinkedIn than to other social networks, which is probably because people almost exclusively post marketing-related content as opposed to their children’s photos or social “chatter.” This means there is less clutter on LinkedIn, making a person capable of consuming a higher percentage of the content that’s active on LinkedIn at any given time. In other words, a business’ marketing posts are more likely to be noticed on LinkedIn than somewhere else.

Lawyers and law firms generally don’t measure new clients and new work coming in the form of leads. That may be why HubSpot has not generated as much marketing traction in the legal arena as in other industries. But LinkedIn unquestionably leads to people reading your blog and obviously reviewing your LinkedIn profile. The two leading sources of traffic to my blog are Twitter and LinkedIn. Facebook is now also sending me a fair amount of traffic. Google, of course, generates random searches, but it’s not bringing people who followed a link from someone they trust. To generate regular traffic to your LinkedIn profile, I’d suggest the following:

• Blog well. Your target audience is looking for thought leaders and people with strong word of mouth reputations. When deciding whether to follow your blog LinkedIn is often the first place people look for your background. Many prefer a LinkedIn bio over a law firm website bio.
• Share others’ posts and news stories on your LinkedIn home page. The feeds go into your connections’ news and makes clear you are well road.
• Share your own blog posts on your LinkedIn home page. This makes it easy for heavy users of LinkedIn to read your posts, share your posts, and ‘Like’ them.
• Stay active in LinkedIn groups.
• Do a nice job with your profile. Most lawyers way under utilize LinkedIn’s profile feature.