Hyper-connectivity and FOMO have got everybody hooked onto social platforms. Are businesses leveraging this untapped goldmine of potential leads?
With 2025 around the corner and the focus on maximizing demand generation, this is the optimum time to formulate and adopt new social media lead generation strategies for social media platforms. What worked in the previous or the current year might be redundant for the upcoming period. Keeping up with the social media trends means consistently fine-tuning the existing scheme to churn out better leads and engagements.
In this article, we explore eight foolproof strategies for 2025 that would help your brand get better prospects through social platforms.
But a bit of background before that. To understand the strategies, you must grasp the basics, which are not as straightforward as they may seem.
What is social media lead generation?
While all types of media can show a brand’s personality, no channel does it better than social. There, brands have the freedom to express what they are like and get immediate feedback.
It is this feedback of likes, comments, and clicks on advertisements and social posts that is social media lead generation. It involves building a relationship with your potential buyers before you approach them.
This is an inbound marketing strategy and has the ability to produce warm and hot leads. Often, many organizations and individuals will contact the buyer directly through social media after looking at their pages and seeing how they work.
Why do you need social media lead generation?
Okay, let’s list out the most popular social media platforms and get some numbers on them.
- Facebook- 3.07 billion/month active users
- WhatsApp- 3 billion/month active users
- YouTube- 2.54 billion/month active users
- Instagram- 2 billion/month active users
- X- 611 million/month active users
So on and so forth. Usually, most social media platforms have visitors in the millions on the lower end.
The maths is easy. If you’re not generating leads through social media, you’re not getting any eyeballs on your brand. Facebook alone probably has most of your prospects on it, and it has increasingly become a place to create community. Imagine that, even in 2025, Facebook’s community pages drive business.
A brand needs social media for lead generation. Not to mention the rise of influencer marketing, which is based on social media.
Or one look at the obsession marketing teams have started to have with TikTok, driving B2B lead generation from there, too. Engagement and attention have become currency to marketers, and great teams have been cashing in on them.
Some to influence culture and most to drive business from it. They run advertisements, or drive webinars, or use thought-leadership and the personal brand to drive tangible, organizational growth.
Social Media Marketing Statistics
Before we delve into the strategies, here are some interesting Social Media Statistics all enterprises must know about:
- Globally, over 4.59 billion people used social media platforms in 2022 to engage with brands.
- On average, a person spends over 2.5 hours daily on these platforms, browsing videos or discovering brands and businesses.
- For B2C marketing, Instagram offers the highest ROI for selling products (33%), followed by Facebook (25%), YouTube (18%), TikTok (12%), and Twitter (6%). LinkedIn ranks as the best platform for B2B Marketers, and 97% of companies trust its offerings as compared to other platforms.
Source
- Brands are predicted to spend massively on social media ads, to the tune of $207.1 billion, to attract prospects.
Needless to say, these are some of the most thriving platforms for businesses to identify their audience, or simply put, their leads.
8 Reliable Strategies for Enhancing Social Media Lead Generation in the Coming Year
1. Optimize your handles
If your business has its presence across social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, or Twitter, optimize these pages with the correct details. From the perfect image dimension/resolution, website link, email address, or phone number, all details should be visible on your platforms. Experts recommend using a CTA on the bio like “click on website/call for a free consultation” for a quick engagement with the prospect.
2. Create a gated community.
Gated content helps create a sense of exclusivity for your potential customers. Content that needs sign-up or limited-access webinars not only procures data for email marketing but also makes the prospect feel special and substantially increases your brand value.
3. Go live
Businesses often overlook a vital fact, i.e., the human connection. Static ad campaigns do their job of attracting leads, sure. But going live during a webinar, launching a new service or product, or community events, affirms consumer trust in the brand, and they are likely to engage with your brand more. Sharing your expertise after thorough preparation, emphasizing the quality of products or services, or sharing about your latest ventures during a live event ensures your leads look up to you as a thought leader.
4. Launch referral programs
A referral program is a great strategy to incentivize your audience instead of word-of-mouth publicity or content sharing. Giving free access to educational content, free products or services, and discounts to users encourages them to create user-generated content that attracts better leads. Statistics reveal that user-generated content, like comments, videos, and testimonials, appears 2.4X more authentic to consumers.
5. Leverage the power of influencers.
There is a profound reason why brands engage with influencers to promote their products or services in exchange for perks. Influencers have a strong social connection with a wide audience base that finds them relatable and trusts their user-generated content. 92% of consumers trust influencer marketing over traditional marketing, and this is precisely why businesses must leverage the power of influencers.
6. Incorporate chatbots
By incorporating chatbots and conversational AI mechanisms, brands can ensure sending a robust response to a potential lead around the clock. If your business targets globally-based leads, it is impossible to provide a round-the-clock response to a lead. AI-integrated chatbots can execute professional conversations around acknowledging, providing FAQs, generating sign-up forms, and understanding the customer’s pain points. 63% of consumers interact better with a brand with a chatbot integrated with their social media platforms.
7. Harness the power of ads and later add personalization.
Lead-generation ads on social media help elevate the social media advertising strategy to the next level. The leads can sign up on pre-populated forms on social media platforms, easing the sign-up process. LinkedIn lead generation forms have an average conversion rate as high as 13% and generate high-quality leads, affirm the ad campaign’s ROI, and help better management of the leads across the sales funnel. Other platforms like Facebook and Instagram also offer lead-generation ad features to gauge better leads. Through further research on buyer personas, analytics, and data-driven insights, brands can personalize offers to the target leads to help convert them into customers.
8. Generate lead magnets through offers.
It is imperative to launch lucrative offers like free tools, consultation, discount codes, free-trial products, and services to attract the right audience to your brand. This strategy boosts sales prospecting to a great extent. 50% of marketers confess to having better conversion rates by leveraging top lead magnets in their sales prospecting strategy.
Social Media Lead Generation Advertising
Social media ads play a huge role in converting the customer into a paying customer. For B2C buyers, this has been true for a long time. But B2B has caught up, and there’s a single reason why: trust.
Social media has become a marker of trust between brands and buyers, but this goes beyond brand interaction. Buyers are looking at the people behind the brand. What do they stand for?
Who are they? And what are they saying?
Ads are necessary for awareness and to nurture your segment- to remind your buyer that you are in the game and to gain mindshare.
Social Media and Paid Ads Best Practices
But to run ads, there are a few things you need to consider.
1. Researching your ICP
Before running ads, your teams must have a solid grasp on who your core buyers are. They don’t need an ABM strategy just yet, but they need to understand the type of buyers they are targeting. The reason behind this is to ensure the creative lands are attention-grabbing.
2. Choosing the right channel
When the team understands the ICP, they will realize that the potential buyer frequents a particular social media platform more than the others. For B2B, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and X are among the best channels. But don’t rule out the others just yet.
Observe and analyze your data to find segments within segments. Buyers who use LinkedIn AND Instagram or YouTube AND Facebook. This will help you target buyers with precision.
3. Finance and Budget
Your optimization teams need to be very careful here. Setting a strict budget is the first thing you do before running any campaign on any channel. The costs of running a campaign can increase quickly and bloat. While many tools will take care of your bids and budgets, you must be in control of where to allocate these funds and for how long.
Here’s how much it would cost to run campaigns on each channel.
4. The Creatives
The ad copies that your copywriters and designers create must be striking. However, not in the way you think, it must reflect the buyers’ need and your solution. It has to be benefit-driven.
Each copy must tell a story of what’s in it for the buyers. This is usually one of the toughest parts of executing social media ad strategies. Creatives are subjective and can land differently for different types of people.
To overcome this, you must speak to multiple people of the same account- for example, how does your solution solve an X problem for the CFO? And in the same company, how does the solution solve Y problem for the CTO?
Creatives that do this gain trust over time, and they get talked about in the same organization, increasing the chances of buy-in.
5. A/B Testing
You will have to create multiple creatives to test which one is working. While A/B testing is popular, if you have the budget, multi-variate testing is a good option. Keep the pool small but test wide. This gives you depth and a clearer picture of which creatives land more and why.
How to measure the success of your paid social media campaigns
1. CTR
This is the most obvious one. But honestly, it can go wrong because there’s a lot of bot traffic. A lot of it. And marketing teams must put checks in place to identify that some bots are sophisticated enough to fool tools and even trained eyes.
2. Conversations
Have the conversations around your social media platforms increased? Increased engagement, enquiries, and other activity a good sign that your campaigns worked. It is one of the best metrics.
3. Follower Count
One metric that is also quite talked about is followers. Did they increase while you ran the campaign? While not directly tied to campaign success, it is a good metric. However, this also depends on the goal of your campaign. Was it awareness or something else- answering this question gives clarity.
4. ROAS
Finally, did you get enough on your spending? This is a question your CFO is going to ask. The metrics need to reflect the final value. What did you want to achieve, and did you achieve it?
But ROAS has been getting flak lately because it’s short-sighted. But ROAS will define advertising for a while. Cultural impact is vital, but so is finance, especially for the C-suites.
5. Takeaway
As we wind up 2025, we have already witnessed how social media strategies have evolved and led to newer mechanisms and pathways for 2026. Social platforms offer a hyper-connected network of prospects, and many enterprises are hitting the bull’s eye by following the right strategies aligned with their business goals. Optimizing pages, launching lucrative deals and gated content, harnessing influencer marketing, floating social media ads, and using the power of chatbots are pivotal to acing the lead generation game.
The key is to attract better leads, drive meaningful conversions, and forge stronger connections by adopting the foolproof strategies discussed. Ultimately, it is the fusion of data-driven insights, compelling storytelling, and adoption of the above critical strategies that help brands achieve unparalleled growth and revenue along the way.