As the premier social media site for professionals, LinkedIn is where business users go to inform themselves about developments in their industry, to find new employees and to make buying decisions in the business-to-business (B2B) category. It is, then, the best place to market to business professionals. With over 100 million users that are decision makers in their company, LinkedIn lead generation is likely the best place to find qualified leads for a marketing effort. The site estimates that over 80% of B2B leads that are sourced from social media come from LinkedIn.

There are ways to do lead generation on LinkedIn manually that are free but there are also an increasing number of tools that will automate the process to provide a larger number of leads in less time. Whether free or paid methods, the site offers the most cost-effective way of conducting lead generation when compared to performing a paid advertising campaign on a search engine or using other sites to find customers.