Businesses are always looking for more customers and to generate new leads. Social media is a great place to build a community and engage with audiences for small businesses and startups. Not only can social media help you raise brand awareness, but it can also be used to acquire new leads and ultimately new customers.

Below are nine ways to acquire new leads and customers using social media.

1. Answer questions and inbound messages on social media.

Five in six social messages that need responses are not answered by brands. A simple way to acquire new leads is by implementing a social listening strategy and making it your goal to respond to every inbound tweet, Facebook post, comment, etc.

2. Monitor social media for hot leads.

Social media monitoring isn’t just for customer service and answering questions relating specifically to your brand name. You should also monitor social media for buying indication terms within your industry and product category. Monitor for people asking for recommendation requests from friends in your product category. Listen for general discussions, questions, and conversations about your industry and product category.

These might provide great opportunities to engage and possibly even acquire a new lead. Don’t be a creepy, though, and only interfere if it makes sense. You may not need to get involved at all or your engagement may simply be giving them best practices or tips. After further engagement, though, it could also lead to sending them a demo request form or other lead capture form.

3. Utilize Twitter cards.

Twitter cards help you by removing one more step between a click and a form complete. They allow you to collect a lead’s email address right on Twitter, without having to take them away from their Twitter experience. This allows for less friction and a better form conversion rate than taking your audience off Twitter and onto your own landing page. Be careful with these leads, though, as most people only use their personal email address instead of their work email on their social media accounts.

4. Implement Facebook’s CTA button on your Facebook page.

Facebook rolled out a new call-to-action feature on Pages in December. You have the ability to select from a group of seven distinct CTA buttons — like Sign Up, Watch Video, Contact Us, Book Now and more. The CTA will be featured at the top of your page in the featured image next to the “Like” button. This gives you an easy way to use your Facebook page to generate new leads.

5. Post presentations and slide decks to SlideShare.

SlideShare allows you to easily embed a lead form into the body of your presentation. You can also allow people to download your presentations by filling out a lead form. This can be an easy way to capture new leads.

At Salesforce, we use SlideShare to post presentations from our events as well as presentations with content from our recent ebooks and research.

6. Use images.

Incorporate more photo tweets and Facebook posts into your social strategy for increased engagement.

Our Social Engagement Benchmark Report for Twitterfound that brands tweet photos only 8% of the time, although consumers are more than twice as likely to retweet a photo tweet. This can especially lead to more engagement with posts that contain links to gated ebooks, webinars, demos, and other content.

7. Share exclusive content on your social channels.

Social audiences love exclusive content. Brands are creating so much content now that it’s easy to put something “exclusive” to share only to your social channels to encourage a form complete.

Social Advertising

Advertising on social media, such as promoted tweets, Facebook ads, and LinkedIn Sponsored Updates can be a great way to generate new leads. Below are a couple unique ways you can specifically use social advertising to generated new leads beyond the “traditional” sponsored tweets, stories, and posts.

8. Advertise to lookalike audiences.

Most of your social audience likely already knows your brand and may even be customers. Sometimes it can be hard to find new audiences on social media — social advertising can be a great way to reach new audiences. Using lookalike audiences on Facebook, you can create an advertising segment that is similar to a specific list of great value — say your email subscribers. This will give you the ability to target a brand new audience with very similar characteristics and likes as the audience you already know enjoys your brand and value proposition.

9. Use Custom Audiences.

Using a tool like Active Audiences or Social.com, you can now reach customers and prospects you already know. You are able to upload your own list of customers or prospects — like everyone who registered for last month’s webinar, downloaded a specific whitepaper, or attended your conference — and target them directly on Facebook or Twitter, giving you the ability to be much more personalized and targeted in your social advertising, moving these prospects further down the funnel toward purchase.

Social media can be a powerful way to acquire new leads and customers — especially in the beginning for small businesses. The cost per lead tends to be slightly lower and can help you gain your first milestone of customers. As you continue to grow, your social strategy should evolve and will continue to be a major source of new leads and customers.

This post originally appeared on the Salesforce Blog.