Lead generation 'can be boosted by social media'

Combining social media with traditional marketing methods is an ideal way of improving lead generation, it has been suggested.

Speaking to Marketing Sherpa, Sandy Carter of IBM argued that integrating social media is more beneficial than running a separate campaign on websites such as Twitter or Facebook.

"All of our campaigns involve a combination of traditional marketing, plus social media," she stated, adding: "We actually don't believe in a solid social media campaign".

Ms Carter said that the computer firm ran a roadshow in order to promote its new WebSphere sMash product and utilised Twitter in order to generate interest in the event by offering participants a code that gave them the opportunity to talk to one of IBM's chief technical officers about the product.

Blogs were also used to provide information about developments at the roadshow and Ms Carter stated that "with all these social media add-ons, we got an incremental ten per cent lift in our registrations for virtually no cost".

Such methods may be of interest to companies that are launching a new product and are considering using social media for to improve lead generation and product awareness.

Marketing Sherpa recently carried out research suggesting that pay-per-click marketing on Facebook is growing in popularity, with 17.2 per cent of those surveyed investing in this area occasionally over the past year.

Written by Julian Poulter and Copyright "Selling People 2009"