Why would you want to take time and effort to attract organic Facebook leads when you could just pay for prospects? 

Organic leads are free, and there are plenty of ways to get started, even if you’re not sure how. Social media sites like Facebook provide several free tools to start building a community, including:

• Facebook groups
• stories
• posts

Facebook also provides an “insights” tool, allowing you to measure responsiveness, reach, and clicks. 

Then there’s the overall effectiveness of your advertising. To get the best results from your campaigns, some say it’s better to combine paid and free social media leads.

Another advantage with organic leads is these prospects are already interested in your product or service. They may just need some nurturing to convince them to buy.

If you need a further reason, here it is: Your organic ads can allow you to build lasting results from people who already feel they know and trust you.

That’s the main benefits covered. However, how do you start getting a steady stream of organic leads?

This article will explain, but first, let’s go over the difference between organic and paid Facebook leads.

What Are Organic Facebook Leads?

As explained above, you don’t pay for organic Facebook leads. Instead, you build them by creating written and visual content and sharing it wherever you think your audience might be. 

Organic leads are crucial to any inbound marketing campaign, and they can ensure you get interest from your ideal prospects.

While organic Facebook leads won’t cost you anything, gaining them may be time-consuming, and your results can depend on your creativity levels, where you place your content, and the way you promote it.

In contrast, paid ads are advertising services you pay for on a specific platform. Paid leads are usually known as PPC ads. Social media sites all provide PPC ads in varying forms. In Facebook’s case, you can create customized lead ads, for example.

5 Tips to Get Facebook Leads Organically

Getting Facebook leads organically doesn’t need to be complicated. With some proven methods, you can start getting free traffic from interested prospects.

In the following section, you’ll find five ways and some tips on how you can implement them yourself.

1. Join Facebook Groups for Your Industry and Post Links to Your Website

When Facebook announced a greater focus on “meaningful” discussion, it was met with positive results.

The move meant the social network’s users are now more engaged with groups, and Facebook says 400 million people are in groups that it considers meaningful.

Not only that, Facebook believes in groups so much it paid an estimated $10 million for a SuperBowl ad, writes CNBC.

That’s a huge audience and a lot of prospects.

Since these groups already have an active membership of interested followers, why not reach out to them?

Join some industry-related groups. Begin posting helpful content and answering questions where you can. Feel free to talk about your business and what it does to get people to message you on Facebook or your website. Just make sure you’re not overly promotional.

When looking for suitable groups to join, you’ll have to think of your typical audience and the day-to-day problems they may have. If your product or service can solve them, sign up, interact with group members, and get conversations rolling.

You can do this by:

• posting informative content
• asking and answering questions
• offering free content to get group members to sign up for your newsletter or your other marketing materials

Although there are no golden rules for posting in groups as such, you may like to consider a few things:

• When you use the group approach, ensure you’re consistent. You may not see results at first, but you should in time if you’re targeting the correct groups.
• Get the balance right. You’ll need to be visible in groups, but you don’t want to reply so often it looks like spam.
• Post at times of the highest engagement. As research from CoSchedule shows, this differs for each business sector. 

2. Optimize Your Facebook Business Page

Since their introduction, Facebook business pages have undergone considerable changes and continue to improve and evolve. Although business pages are getting increasingly sophisticated, just setting up a page isn’t enough: You’ll want your page to do some work by gaining organic Facebook leads.

You can do this by optimizing your page for increased clickthroughs and revenues. However, you’ll only need to optimize the parts relevant to gaining leads. Facebook suggests you concentrate on three main areas:

• your business name and description
• profile photos and cover photos
• a call to action (CTA)

Let’s look at each of these areas.

Your Business Description

Information about your businesses’ purpose and how you can help should be readily available. Likewise, you’ll need to write a description that sells your product or service while explaining your concept.

Other ways to optimize your description for Facebook leads include:

• using short, clear sentences and simple language
• writing short paragraphs to make your content more scannable
• highlighting the most important information at the start of your text
• keeping your descriptions super-short
• using keywords, but not overdoing them

Writing an About Page

Write your “About” page in the same way you would on your website. Add some background about yourself, the origins of your business, and anything you feel resonates with your target market.

Then, enhance confidence by adding a physical address and phone number so your prospects can contact you. You can also add different keywords. Use a free keyword tool like Ubersuggest to find suggestions, or try out the paid version to get extra features. 

Personalize Where You Can and Add Images

Facebook has templates for a range of business categories allowing you to customize the page depending on your sector. However, templates can make every page look the same, so personalize where you can.

You can begin customizing your page by updating your business page tabs and adding customization for visitors to sign up for your newsletter.

For further branding and personalization, add a cover image and profile photo. People like to know who’s behind a business, and a strong cover image can get you noticed.

When choosing an image:

• Keep it relevant and consistent with your other branding.
• Follow Facebook’s guidelines for images.
• Choose a responsive image with impact.
• Make it simple by limiting the number of pictures you use.

Finally, finish with a strong CTA. Facebook has a CTA button you can add to include contact details or to make a booking etc.

3. Post Content That Capitalizes on Current Events in Your Industry

Draw in organic Facebook leads by covering industry events and trends. You can track these through newspapers, industry press releases, trade publications, and Google Trends.

Piggybacking or “newsjacking” off current events within your industry trends works well for two reasons: 

• First, if a subject is at the forefront of people’s minds, they might want to find out more. 
• Secondly, it demonstrates your company is eager to keep up with developing events and trends.

There are a few methods you could use with this type of content.

For instance, you could write regular articles or blog posts around trending topics. However, why not get creative with video commentary and related images? The more imagination you show, the more shareable your content becomes.

Here are some creative ideas you can consider to get Facebook users sharing:

• Use popular memes. Add a witty caption or include your contact info with them.
• Promote specific products off the back of a trending story.
• Present a video report. Or a Q&A-style video about a product or service.
• Host a special offer or a deal.

4. Hold Facebook Live Events

Facebook provides a few video services, so why use Facebook Live? Well, viewership is the most pressing reason—Facebook Live has a much higher view rate.

Facebook Live lets users live stream video content in real-time, and you can choose the format. Some examples to consider are:

• virtual conferences
• Q&As
• virtual tours
• staff introductions

Above all, though, Facebook Live is a way to interact with prospects so they can get to know you better. This way, they can see the faces behind the brand and become more comfortable with your company and what you offer.

You can stream from your laptop or mobile, and you can choose who can attend your Facebook Live events. There’s also comment moderation, and you can schedule events and promote them before a live stream.

If you haven’t used Facebook Live before, don’t worry. You don’t need to be a tech whiz. However, if you’re looking for guidance, you’ll find tutorials readily available.

While there are many ways you could use Facebook Live, Sephora and Bloomberg are two brands you can mimic and adapt their approach to your strategy. 

As a news channel, Bloomberg covers current events on Facebook Live. It also highlights upcoming Live events to stir interest and create anticipation.

Sephora’s past live events include beauty tips, window reveals, new products, and trends.

Consider doing the same. Offering product demos and reveals and responding to breaking news is something every brand can do to gain Facebook leads.

5. User-Generated Content

Are you looking for a free way to get content and to develop Facebook organic leads? Then consider user-generated content (USG).

UGC gives your brand authenticity and credibility in the eyes of potential prospects. After all, if happy users feel strongly enough about your brand to create content around it, that’s a good sign, right?

UGC is imperative to the purchasing decision, and most age groups are open to it. According to research from media experience platform Cloudinary, visual UGC content is popular among varying demographics:

Cloudinary’s survey showed:

• Seventy percent of Gen X and Gen Z consumers surveyed found UGC either “extremely helpful” or “very helpful.”
• Seventy-eight percent of millennials said the same.

Further, although visual UGC was less popular among other groups, 52 percent of baby boomers and 45 percent of the silent generation found it helpful too.

Sanjay Sarathy, the VP of Marketing at Cloudinary, says:

“The survey shows a clear trend of people increasingly wanting to hear from others through user-generated, visual content.”

Sarathy went on to add that brands need to analyze their content if they’re to deliver the correct mix of UGC, visual, and text content.

UGC can work incredibly well for video content on Facebook, and it’s also vital to inbound marketing by:

• enabling consumers to discover your brand
• attracting and closing prospects
• increasing brand awareness

Many brands are already taking this approach, like Coca-Cola.

Some years ago, it launched a personalized “Share a Coke With” campaign in Australia. Coca-Cola’s digital promotion allowed consumers to send virtual Cokes on Facebook.

OK, you might not have the same advertising budget or reach as Coca-Cola, but the company shows how creativity and creating a buzz beyond the usual UGC can get you noticed.

Think about how your brand can do the same.

Easy Ways to Earn Facebook Leads Organically

Conclusion

With millions of users and thousands of communities, Facebook is a fantastic place to market your products and services and gain leads.

Although they may take longer to show results, organic Facebook leads can pay dividends by getting an already interested audience to visit your website, sign up for newsletters, and become customers.

By providing other group members with answers to questions, valuable insights, and industry updates, you can establish yourself as an expert while building confidence among prospects.

Using UGC, holding Facebook Live events, and piggybacking on trends are also effective ways of engaging an audience and building relationships in the long term.

Do you use organic Facebook ads? Share your tips for effective campaigns below.