How to Measure Social Media Lead Generation

How to Measure Social Media Lead Generation:
rom Business 2 Community by Michelle Hill
This is my third post in our ‘how to measure your social media objectives’ series, the first two being:

• How to measure brand perception on social media
• How to measure brand awareness on social media

Today we explore how to measure lead generation, a priority for most businesses. Firstly, let’s revisit the sales funnel and remind ourselves where lead generation sits.

Engagement

Social media lead generation starts with a conversation and it’s important at this stage to get a clear understanding of what drives audience participation so that you identify which topics are the most likely to draw people into the engagement part of the funnel. By using analytics tools such as Facebook Insights and Google Analytics in combination with a shortened URL, you will be able to gain insight into how people are interacting with your social media activities.
At this stage you might track re-tweets, shares, likes, posts, @mentions etc. Also clicks through to landing pages on your website where people might download content or sign up for a webinar. Granted, at this stage they are not considered a hard lead but rather a soft lead where they are happy to give you their email address and consequently fall into the ‘opportunity’ category.

Opportunity

At this stage, you want to be measuring their journey through your website such as:

• Which pages they visited
• How long their spent on each page
• Did they go on to download further content
• Did they start to fill out a form but decide not to submit
• Where they exited

Once you gain insight into these areas, it will help you to identify where your best opportunities lie. You can also use this information to try and influence the journeys of future visitors.

Convert

The last stage of the sales funnel – this is where you can tie your tweets and likes to revenue. Obviously this will depend on your particular business but examples of metrics you want to track might be the number of purchases that resulted from:

• Clicking on a link on Twitter offering a discount voucher
• Posting a product on Facebook
• Downloading content promoted on Google+
• A conversation that took place on LinkedIn

Be patient

Lead generation on social media can take time. Yes you might get the odd one or two which convert immediately but as a rule, it’s a nurturing process which requires patience and a lot of hard work. As long as you monitor your activities, adjust accordingly where necessarily and are willing to invest the time, then you will reap the rewards.