8 Steps to Master Social Prospecting in 2025 | Genesy

These are the 8 simple steps to master social media prospecting:

• Step 1: Optimize Your social media Profile
• Step 2: Define Your Ideal Prospect
• Step 3: Choose the Right social media Subscription
• Step 4. Find Your Leads’ e-mail Addresses on social media
• Step 5. Find Your Leads’ Telephone Numbers on social media
• Step 6. Personalize Your Connection Requests
• Step 7. Build Sales Prospecting Messages
• Step 8. Build Relationships Through social media Engagement

Like it or not, social media continues to be the number 1 professional social network. No other competitor has managed even to come close to stealing its limelight. 

Which is why you’re reading this post. social media prospecting is a thing. 

You may be wondering: How can I use social media Prospecting to generate leads and conversions? 

Well, that’s precisely what we’ll explain in a short minute. 

social media prospecting isn’t hard per se, but you need to follow a set of steps to get the most out of it. 

Step 1: Optimize Your social media Profile

Before moving ahead with any social media prospecting strategies and tactics, you will first have to optimize your social media profile for prospecting. 

This means:

• Adding an up-to-date and high-quality profile picture that aligns with your brand.
• Adding an up-to-date banner (preferably related to your company branding or your services).
• Crafting a bold headline about yourself. This is where you can be as witty as you like.
• Writing an engaging summary of your professional expertise. Here’s where you must communicate your value proposition and let other professionals know how you can help them reach their goals. 

Step 2: Define Your Ideal Prospect

This is another essential step you must take before crafting your prospecting messages or contacting any potential leads. 

You need to know who you are looking for and what value you can offer them.

From having a specific industry in mind to identifying their job title and company sizes, everything about your ideal prospect that you define right at the start will help you to tailor your outreach messages better to ensure that:

1. You understand their pain points
2. Your messaging resonates with them 

Why LinkedIn Prospecting Matters in 2025

The reason so many B2B sales teams rely on LinkedIn prospecting in 2025 is simple: the platform brings together verified professionals, job titles, and live company data—all in one place.

Compared with traditional cold-calling lists, LinkedIn’s ecosystem offers context: you can see shared connections, past experiences, and real-time engagement. These signals make personalization more authentic and improve reply rates dramatically.

When combined with automation or AI prospecting platforms, the result is scale without losing the human touch. Instead of spending hours on manual searches, you can build segmented campaigns, automate outreach, and still sound personal.

Step 3: Choose the Right social media Subscription

At the moment, social media Premium subscription includes four plans:

• Career
• Business
• Sales Navigator Core
• Recruiter Lite 

The Sales Navigator Core plan is the right one for prospecting purposes. It will help you with your prospecting efforts and generate leads from social media.

Step 4. Find Your Leads’ e-mail Addresses on social media

After selecting the right premium subscription plan, it’s time to find the email addresses of your target leads. 

There are three ways to do it:

1. Retrieving the emails manually by clicking on the Contact Info button. Since you will have to manually check each profile for each lead and go through the same steps for each profile, it can become very time-consuming. 

2. Using a scraping tool: You can use various extensions for this but we’d suggest Google Chrome’s Web Scraper. This method may help you save time, but it can become tricky if you are not used to such tools. 
3. Using a third-party tool: Genesy, for instance, among other things, can also automatically scrape all the emails of your leads, automatically qualify them, and help you save a ton of time. 

Step 5. Find Your Leads’ Telephone Numbers on social media

Similar to Step 4, you have the option on social media to find out the phone numbers of your leads. 

But there’s a catch: most people do not show their phone numbers publicly for obvious reasons. 

Nevertheless, you can still follow the same steps as with social media emails to retrieve that data. 

1. Retrieving the phone numbers manually by clicking on the Contact Info button. Just like with emails, manually checking each profile for each lead and going through the same steps for each profile to find each phone number can be very tedious. And the worst part is that you are not guaranteed that they will have their phone number publicly displayed on social media. 
2. Using a scraping tool: We suggest either following the same strategy as with the emails or trying out Google Sheets using Google Script. 
3. Using a third-party tool: Here’s where third-party tools like Genesy can help you automatically find the phone numbers of your target leads. Best of all, even if the leads do not have their phone number attached to their social media profile, Genesy can search other platforms to make sure each lead is matched with a phone number that belongs to them. 

Step 6. Personalize Your Connection Requests 

Going straight into selling mode since message one can alienate potential leads. 

That’s why, when sending connection requests and introducing yourself, start slow, get to know the lead first, and adequately introduce yourself as you go on with the conversation.

Avoid generic or boring conversation starters and see how you can grab their attention based on their personal interests. 

Step 7. Build Sales Prospecting Messages

After you’ve established a good relationship with the potential leads, it’s time to craft a personalized social media message to them.

While the purpose of these messages is to sell your product or services, that doesn’t mean you can’t still write to them in a conversational and natural tone. Just make sure that you include a clear call to action, such as: 

• Scheduling a call (share the link to your Calendly or another tool where they can schedule a meeting with you) 
• Scheduling a demo (you can link to the demo page where they can schedule the free demo with someone from your team)
• Inviting them to your next webinar, where they can learn more about you and the company. 

4 Common Mistakes to Avoid in LinkedIn Prospecting

Even with the best strategy, many professionals fall into the same traps that limit results.

Common mistakes include:

1. Sending generic messages to dozens of leads at once.
2. Ignoring personalization cues such as recent posts or shared connections.
3. Over-automating without monitoring replies.
4. Neglecting CRM updates, leading to lost context.

Avoiding these mistakes ensures your LinkedIn prospecting feels personal and credible. Tools like Genesy AI help balance automation with authenticity by keeping responses timely and data synced with your CRM.

Step 8. Build Relationships Through social media Engagement

This step is often overlooked. However, it is strongly related to Step 6. 

Once leads accept your connection requests and you start building relationships with them through direct messages, another aspect that can help you generate more leads and increase conversion is keeping your social selling strategy active on social media. 

What do we mean by this? 

If someone connects with you and either shares, interacts with one of your posts, or leaves a comment, follow up with that. 

Reply to their comment back.

Comment on the post they reshared from you. 

Or send them a direct message linking back to the post they interacted with on your feed. 

It will help you start or continue a conversation and build stronger relationships with your leads. 

How AI Is Changing Social Media Prospecting

Artificial intelligence has redefined what efficient prospecting looks like. AI doesn’t replace salespeople—it amplifies them.

Modern AI prospecting platforms analyze lead behavior, recommend the best time to message, and even generate personalized follow-ups. Instead of manually juggling LinkedIn and email, reps can manage everything from one multichannel sales automation dashboard.

Genesy AI is one example: its AI Sales Agents handle connection requests, email sequences, and even meeting scheduling while respecting LinkedIn’s outreach limits. That means predictable results and zero risk of account suspension.

Final Thoughts: From Manual Prospecting to AI Sales Agents

Prospecting used to be about persistence. Today, it’s about precision.

With tools like Genesy AI, you can shift from repetitive outreach to intelligent engagement. By combining LinkedIn prospecting with AI-driven sales automation, your pipeline grows faster while your workload shrinks.

If you want to see how automation and personalization can coexist, start a free trial of Genesy AI and let an AI Sales Agent handle your next campaign.

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