How LinkedIn Lead Gen is Different From Facebook Lead Gen

Most coaches these days are using either Facebook or LinkedIn as their primary social media platform. Sure, Instagram and TikTok get thrown in there, too, but Facebook and LinkedIn are by far the most popular social platforms for lead generation and client attraction.

In today's episode, I talk about how lead generation on LinkedIn is different from lead generation on Facebook, including...

• The fundamental differences between LinkedIn and Facebook
• Why you've been able to generate leads from one but not the other
• How engagement on LinkedIn is nothing like engagement on Facebook
• Why your most popular Facebook posts don't seem to get any traction on LinkedIn

Today's topic is all about lead generation on social media. More specifically, how lead generation on LinkedIn is different from lead generation on Facebook. Most coaches these days are using Facebook and/or LinkedIn to attract new clients, and sure, Instagram, Tik Tok, they get thrown in there too. But for most people, their strategy centers around Facebook or LinkedIn. And today, I want to talk about the key differences between the two, specifically when it comes to client attraction and lead generation. 

This is going to be useful for you, whether you're in any of these three situations. Maybe you are already using either Facebook or LinkedIn and are ready to add the other to your lead flow sources. You've already managed to more or less manage one, and now you are considering adding in the other. Or maybe, you're trying to decide which platform to start with, so should you begin with LinkedIn, or should you begin with Facebook? The third situation is maybe you've been using LinkedIn and/or Facebook and have really struggled to get results with one or both of them, and so you're just kind of in this holding pattern, stuck trying to figure out how to just get one of them working properly. 

No matter which of those situations apply to you, it's really important to understand a lot of the key differences between Facebook and LinkedIn, differences in terms of the philosophy behind the platform in the first place, but also just the differences between how dynamics and communication styles differ between the two. Now, let's look at the original purpose of each of these platforms. Facebook was founded, really specifically, to connect friends across the world, to connect you digitally with people that you already know in real life, so really about taking that existing social circle that exists in real life and building that online on Facebook. 

That stands in really stark opposition to LinkedIn’s original core purpose, which is to create a space for online professional networking, which in other words, helps you broaden your network and connect with like-minded professionals that you likely don't know in real life. Whereas Facebook is trying to take your physical, real-life, social circles and replicate those online, LinkedIn is all about helping you broaden your network and meet new like-minded people. 

Now, obviously, both of these platforms have evolved from that original purpose, and specifically with Facebook, they have kind of moved beyond this idea of limiting themselves to connecting with people you already know in real life to this dynamic of meeting people. That's why, for example, you're seeing the rise in activity in Facebook groups. In fact, Facebook groups have only recently really gained a lot of popularity, and that's because Facebook has started to see that okay, people are meeting each other online, people want to meet each other with similar interests online. That's why Facebook started to really pour a lot of resources into the development of its groups feature. 

It's really important to understand the original purpose behind each of the platforms because those purposes directly impact what it looks like to use either of these platforms to attract leads. And if you think about it, in terms of context, Facebook is like a local bar. You hang out in your circle of friends, but you're still social with the other people that are outside the group that you consider your group of core friends. Whereas, LinkedIn is more like a professional networking event—at your local chamber of commerce, people are very clearly coming there to meet new people—and what that means is that the communication styles between the two vary really dramatically. 

So on Facebook, in that “local bar,” so to speak, it's a lot more friendly. There's a lot more small talk, and overall, the conversations that tend to happen there are a lot less linear, so there's not necessarily a hello and then a really linear conversation flow. It's a lot more free flowing. And if you want to tie this back to that idea of a local bar, it's people being energetic and sometimes talking over each other, and the conversation’s over here one second, and then 10 seconds later, it's totally shifted gear and somewhere else. It's a lot less formal and linear in that way. 

However, LinkedIn, if you think of it as that professional networking event, is a lot more direct, linear, and goal- or outcome-oriented, so it's a lot more straight to the point, because everyone is really clear; they have an outcome for them and their business. And we're connecting, you know, seeing if there's room for collaboration, whatever, but it is significantly more outcome-oriented and linear than Facebook. 

The last major difference between the two, at least the last one that I'll talk about today, is what engagement looks like. On Facebook, most of the engagement that happens is public-facing or its outward-facing, so that happens in Facebook groups, comments, posts, direct messages. Aside from direct messages, everything is pretty public and outward-facing. But if you hop on over to LinkedIn and try to adopt the same strategy of depending on LinkedIn groups, well, you're going to notice pretty quickly that LinkedIn groups are just dead and that there's not a lot of really quality engagement happening in LinkedIn groups.

Profile engagement, at least compared to Facebook, is pretty low. If you post the same exact content on Facebook, say you get 50 likes, you can post that exact same post on LinkedIn, and maybe get two likes, even if your audience on either one is the same size, and that's just because that's not where the bulk of engagement happens on LinkedIn. The bulk of engagement on LinkedIn is in the direct messages, and in that way, it's really, really different from Facebook. 

That's why if you tried to, say, take the Facebook approach and just map it straight onto LinkedIn, then you might not have gotten the results that you wanted, and that's because the two have a really fundamentally different approach to how you use them when it comes to attracting clients. All of that kind of explains why your most popular Facebook posts don't get any traction on LinkedIn, or why you don't get any responses to group posts or comments in groups on LinkedIn. And on the flip side, that explains why people on Facebook seem to be put off by 100%, directness and straight to the point, whereas that same approach really can get results on LinkedIn. 

No matter where you are, in terms of what you're using for lead generation, it's really important to understand the differences between how it works on LinkedIn and how it works on Facebook, because you can certainly use them both at the same time to get really great results, but if you're doing one of them well and trying to map that same strategy onto the other, well, you're not going to have a whole lot of luck there. 

My main piece of advice when it comes to client attraction on social media is always master one first and then add another. For me, I mastered Facebook first, and then once I got that Facebook client attraction machine really up and running, then I added LinkedIn to the mix and basically had to again start from scratch to get it up to the point where Facebook is now. You can certainly use both, but you certainly cannot apply the same strategy to both.