Generating B2B Leads on Facebook

I am always amused when people talk about the value of Facebook in B2B and that it can’t generate leads. I think it just comes down to marketing professionals not knowing how to leverage the network in a way that can yield results.

Facebook’s site says they have one billion monthly active users as of October 2012. It would just seem like a no-brainer that there are business leads to be found here and it’s just a metter of finding a way to get in front of them.

What’s been working for us is using the InsideView fan page as a way to deliver content and find new conversations. Of course this also gets the fan page new fans that engage with the page but if all your interested in are new leads then this is a great way to go about it.

InsideView has become a content machine turning out 1-3 papers a month covering everything from Social Selling  Lead Qualification, Using Twitter for Sales and more. Besides just sending all of these papers out through traditional channels and relying on Twitter (which yields too) we built a plan around generating leads on Facebook by creating links to the content directly from our fan page.

We know it works because all of the content links are associated to a Facebook campaign that we can track in our CRM. A week after executing this plan we are already seeing new leads and better yet, new qualified leads that are scored through our Marketing Automation platform Marketo.

Speaking of Marketo, Jason Miller just published an article that talks about their success. Does Facebook generate B2B sales leads?

I’ve talked with some companies being successful with B2B campaigns on Facebook and one is generating over $50,000 a QTR with about a $2.00 cost per lead. That’s an example of a positive ROI on social media.

Image by Daily Infographic