Yes, you've heard all those gurus saying that anybody who is anybody is using social media to drive traffic to your site and make tons of money. Bloggers that focus on building a huge following use social media primarily to attract traffic to their site, build their lists, and make their millions. If you aren't leveraging traffic from Digg and Reddit, then you might as well give up. Right?
Wrong.
First of all, lets discuss some sales terms. A lead is somebody who is somewhat interested in your product. A cold lead is somebody who doesn't even know your product exists. A warm lead has some kin of desire for your product. A hot lead is somebody who has a desire, has already taken their money out of their pocket, and wants to buy something.
Obviously, if you are selling stuff online, the warmer the lead, the better. This is true in all sales. Nobody wants to cold call people and try to persuade them first that they have a need and second that they should do something about it, and third that they should buy the product from you. This takes a lot of time, involves a lot of rejection, and won't generate much sales.
Depending on your sales model, though, and how long your sales funnel is, you might have no choice but to start out with cold leads. This is generally what advertising does. It presents your message to as many cold leads as possible, and identifies the warm ones among them. The warm ones then contact you, and find out about your product. These people are a lot easier to sell to.
In the world of online marketing, any lead that comes to your website from a search engine is a warm lead. Anybody that comes from a paid ad is going to be an even warmer lead.
But what about people that come from social media? Compared to search engine traffic, these people are pretty cold. When they've seen your information on the various social media sites, they weren't in the problem solving mind set. Think about this for a minute. Most people visit those sites for entertainment. It's like watching TV. When you sit down to watch TV at night, are you hoping to see an ad that will solve a problem you've got? Probably not.
If you've got a problem you need solved, or a product you want to buy, you'll likely crack open the phone book.
Does that mean that people don't sell anything from TV ads? Certainly not. There are tons of infomercial precisely because they make money. But those are big productions. They are thirty minutes long, and are designed to get as many viewers as possible, and convert a small percentage of them.
But think about this. At most, people have a couple hundred channels on cable. Of those, there's probably only twenty channels they watch regularly. So when they come across an infomercial, it's really only competing against those other twenty channels for your attention.
Compare this to somebody coming across your tweet or Facebook page. There's literally billions of other pages they could go to. This makes it much less likely they are going to be convinced by your message to come and buy your product. Sure, it might get you some traffic, and they might sign up for your email list if you've got something juicy to give them in exchange from their email address, but will they ever buy anything?
For all the time people spend getting Twitter and Facebook traffic, don't you think you'd be much better off finding the warm leads, rather than trying to convert a bunch of cold leads?
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