You’ve decided to go ahead and add a blog to your company’s website. You also started a Twitter account and a Facebook page, and have hired a social media consultant to manage those for you. Or perhaps you have hired a full-time social media manager.
If you’re like most companies, you’ve done all that hoping that your social media efforts would serve as a lead generation tool. However, most companies – at least those cited in the survey – report that this is not always the case.
It’s difficult to know if social media efforts generate leads, because they often generate them in an indirect way. Sometimes we can effectively measure the effect of a social media campaign. This usually happens when we create a white paper, promote it in social media, remembering to create several different landing pages for each social media channel we use, and requiring people to register before they can download the white paper. In this scenario, we end up knowing exactly how many inquiries we received from each social media channel, and also know how many of these have turned into actual leads – those that have registered.
But in most cases, you won’t go through so much trouble to measure a single social media promotion, especially because social media moves fast and you need to create lots of content and promote it frequently in order to stay fresh and interesting for your prospects.
There are of course other, less accurate but still powerful ways to measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts. One of the easiest is to take a look at your Google Analytics report and see if Twitter, for example, is a top referrer to your site, and if it is, check to see how the people who get there from Twitter behave – do they stay for a while, browse, download white papers, register for webinars? Or do they immediately bounce off?
Even if your social media efforts do not directly generate leads for your business, or not a significant amount of them, there’s a good chance you’ll feel like the majority of the above survey participants and still find value in social media. Social media is not just about generating direct leads. It is often about establishing or strengthening your image and brand, connecting with influencers in your space, nurturing your existing leads, and generating backlinks for your site – this happens when people in your network link back to your site or blog (you need to create great content for that to happen, of course) – and this can help tremendously with your search engine rankings.
Other valid reasons for using social media include monitoring conversations about your brand, and “I’m there because my competitors/ my target audience is there.”
Of course, if none of the above applies to your company, and especially if your target audience, influencers in your space and your competitors are not using social media, you probably don’t need to use it, with the exception of a blog that can be used solely for the purpose of improving your search engine rankings – assuming people search for your product or service online.
I'm Vered, a blogger for hire and social media consultant. I create and implement social media campaigns for my clients, with the goals of increasing brand awareness and loyalty, improving search engine rankings and driving targeted traffic to my clients' websites.
