Let’s talk about Lead Gen: Instagram vs. LinkedIn! Lead generation is the process of harnessing interest from your audience on a particular good or service with the hope of turning their interest into a sale.
For our purposes, lead gen means finding potential new clients and customers to add to your network online that may be interested in what you have to offer, engaging with them, and working towards genuinely chatting with them about your services.
On social media, lead gen is happening everywhere. All those spam messages you get in your email and social media inboxes? Yep- that’s attempted lead gen. LinkedIn and Instagram are two platforms where lead gen is happening and WORKING for small business owners in the times that we have been living in.
While we often talk about creating a lead gen strategy for LinkedIn and streamlining your process, your same strategy for LinkedIn may not successfully translate on Instagram. You can create a strategy for each, but one lead gen strategy won’t work across all platforms. Here are some key similarities & differences in lead gen: Instagram vs. LinkedIn.
Lead Gen: Instagram vs. LinkedIn
How You Search
How you search for potential clients differs on Instagram vs. LinkedIn. Here’s a quick breakdown of how you can go about finding potential leads on each platform:
- Hashtags (Instagram & LinkedIn): On both platforms, you can search for like-minded people/businesses by searching hashtags. Hashtags are more widely used on Instagram, but are still searchable on LinkedIn. Try searching for hashtags that are related to your field of work, services you offer, and location.
- Filtered Search (LinkedIn): When you search on LinkedIn (free plan), you have the option to build a search using a few different filters. This can niche down your search a bit to hone in on location, degree of connection, industry, etc. If you’re specifically looking for people in your area, people that know similar people to you, or people in a certain industry this can be helpful.
- Saved Search on Sales Navigator (LinkedIn): If you use the paid version of LinkedIn and have access to Sales Navigator, you can build a saved, filtered search. This is similar to the filtered search with the free version of LinkedIn with a few exceptions. You can save this search and have it produce new leads on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, and there are additional filters to choose from. This will make your search even more specific and tailored to what you are looking for.
- “View Similar” (Instagram & LinkedIn): On both platforms, you can choose to view people similar to those you may have already found.
Lead Organization
How you choose to organize the people you are following/adding to your network is completely up to you, but your categories may differ:
- Name
- Followed on
- Follow accepted on (if they are private)
- Followed back?
- Engaged (however many times you choose to engage before messaging)
- Messaged
- Response
- Name
- Connection sent on
- Connection accepted on
- Engaged (however many times you choose to engage before messaging)
- Messaged
- Response
Connecting
A key difference between Instagram and LinkedIn lead gen is how you go about connecting with potential leads. On Instagram, you follow someone, simple as that, but you may not be able to message them until a follow request is accepted. You also may be able to message them, but the message may go into their ‘message requests’ until they follow you back.
On LinkedIn, you can follow people or connect with people. You can do both, but for our lead gen purposes, we lead with connecting. When you connect with a person, you have the option to add a note i.e. a short, personal message about why you’d like to add that person to your network. That person will see your connection request with your message and choose to accept it from there. Once it is accepted, you will become part of each other’s networks.
Cold messaging anywhere is uncomfortable- you should never jump right into a sales pitch in a DM or in a connection message.
Engagement
Engaging on Instagram and LinkedIn is essentially the same. As you add people to your network or your following, it is important to engage with their content authentically before expecting anything from them. Like their posts, comment kind and genuine things are their posts- engage, engage, engage! Hopefully this leads to further conversations in your DMs! Once you feel like you’ve established enough of a relationship with them, talking about your work and what you can offer them will feel much more comfortable and less like a real sales pitch.
Lead Gen: Instagram vs. LinkedIn
If you’re ready to make a name for yourself as a thought leader on LinkedIn by logging on, sharing your genius, and just basking in the glow of your newfound visibility- Thought Leaders Collective is the place for you!
You’ll get weekly LinkedIn prompts, access to our supportive Slack community, weekly co-working opportunities and much much more! Check it out and join us inside here!
