The past few years have brought an unprecedented number of breakthroughs for content creators and marketers on the web, with most occurring in the world of search. For many brands, a large segment of their marketing and conversion efforts now occur through sites such as Facebook and Twitter – incredible, considering that these platforms either barely existed ten years ago, or didn’t exist at all. These mediums are ripe with opportunity, but only if your efforts are calibrated properly. If you are failing to generate quality leads on social media networks and are unsure why, then continue reading to find out about some potential obstacles that could be causing it.

Your Audience Targeting Sucks

A message – any message – can resonate with a given audience, but only if the audience corresponds to whom the message is designed to persuade. Many brands must tinker with their messaging before they can effectively start pinging users with content that motivates them to click, sign up or engage in one way or another. In other cases, the message designed may be perfect, but it may be targeted to too large of an audience. Social media lead generation revolves around hyper-niche targeting efforts – through both paid and organic interaction – and as such, your targeted audiences may need to be further refined in order to generate the desired results. Thankfully, all of the major social media platforms make this quite easy to do through standard posts/tweets and through advertising efforts.

Your Listening Efforts Are Lacking

For brands to maximize their lead generation potential on social media, a lot of listening and thoughtful engagement must occur. This not only includes engagement with your fans and on various posts and tweets you make, but outside of your traditional reach as well. This presents a two-fold opportunity, in that you will be able to listen to target audiences and engage with them at the same time. Learning more about what various audiences enjoy, abhor and respond to will help make it possible to craft strategies that maximize lead generation in the future. If your idea of lead generation is comparable to cold calling, then expect continued mediocre results – people respond to active, engaged and personal brands.

Your Promotion Connection Is Broken

If people are seeing, engaging in a limited capacity and sharing your content – but nobody seems to be actually converting – then your promotional connection may be broken. No, we do not mean the link itself, but the abstract connection between feeling moved or motivated by a post and the desire to follow-through by clicking. This can sometimes occur when copy is written to be pinging users with a pitch rather than with a message. Maximizing reach can be achieved through the use of hashtags, but a message that does not truly connect with the user will result in tons of impressions and zero leads. Many people help rectify the situation by asking a couple of simple questions, such as who would want to share the content and why they would click on the promoted lead link.