If you believe the hype, social networks are the place to be for lead generation.

Read up on a few "case studies" of people in this space (usually LinkedIn "experts") and they'll tell you that cold calling is dead and in the future you'll get all your leads from twitter or social networks.

Hmmm...

Sounds a bit like what everyone was punting on ecademy several years back before it just got full of spam.

Anyway, what prompted me to post this is that I'm a member of a lot of groups on LinkedIn and I've noticed a bit of a trend.

Firstly, someone posts a discussion saying "I'm looking for lead generation".

Next you get hundreds of comments from vendors saying "we do X, we'd love to speak with you".

There's one running on one group like this that has 298 comments!

Now, firstly, the initial post rarely has any detail or level of qualification.

Lead generation? Are you talking about online, email, telemarketing? B2B, B2C? How about budget? Basic qualification information really.

If someone rang me and asked for "lead generation" I'd need to know a lot more before I knew whether it was something I could help them with.

On top of that there are hundreds of people responding to this "enquiry" on the forum.

Put aside the fact that this means you're potentially up against hundreds of competitors, the question I'm asking is "who's in this group?".

Apparently, it's loads of people like you trying to find leads!

Anyone who has been to a real world "networking" event will know that most of the people there are only interested in selling you something.

Now, that's not to say that there are some quality groups on social networking sites, just as in the real world. But, realistically, there's a lot of rubbish out there.

All the "popular" groups on LinkedIn have 1000's of people posting so much stuff that it just overwhelms you. If you posted a discussion on these groups it'll be swept off the front page in minutes.

You see, as I've posted here many times before, the thing with anything online is that it gets to a saturation point very quickly.

Maybe I'll post a discussion about what ROI anyone has had from these groups and see how many responses I get to that.

Labels: b2b lead generation, social networking sites