How to verify email addresses and leads from social media

Billions of people use social media, which makes it a great source of new customers.

But social media users are generally low value because social media doesn't convert as well as email marketing. As the saying goes: "social is for discovery, email is for conversions."

So, you want to get their email addresses for a higher chance of converting sales. But how do you get the emails? And more importantly, how do you make sure they're high-quality and valid contacts?

There are two different things to check:

• Protect against bots, scrapers, and malicious use of scripts
• Prevent the use of low-quality emails like disposable email addresses.

There are open-source libraries out there you can use for free or no cost, but you'll likely need some coding expertise to implement them.

The best way is to implement this spam, bot, and fraud protection at the source to prevent them in the first place. For example, we have a system implemented to ensure that every POPSMASH campaign is protected from spam bots and that checks for low-quality email services before they are submitted.

To go a step further, POPSMASH even requires double opt-in email validation. This means then when users try to participate in your campaign, they must respond via the email address they provided so we know that it's a valid email address. And we do it all automatically for all campaigns.

However, you do it, make sure you validate the email addresses and leads you get from social media to keep the quality of your list high because high quality = high ROI.