Marketers, ROI on Social Media Marketing Requires a Mandatory Next Step: Conversion

Marketers, ROI on Social Media Marketing Requires a Mandatory Next Step: Conversion:from Business 2 Community by Mickael Bentz
Engage with fans and cross your fingers
Social media marketing strategies today focus on building engagement and virality. We often call it the “like quest” at Neolane, because it’s a strategy pursued by many brands. They invest heavily in creating social media engagement (e.g. likes, comments, shares, retweets, pins, etc.) with fans in the hopes that:

• Fans will naturally become more loyal
• Fans will naturally consume more and more often
• Some fans will naturally become ambassadors or promoters (see the definition of the famous Net Promoter Score); in other words, they will attract new customers through word of mouth

But the reality of fostering social media engagement is quite different. Consider the two following statements:
Engagement on social media has no direct impact on sales
A recent study analyzing social media’s contributions to this Black Friday reveals that 0% of sales came directly from Twitter and 0.68% directly from Facebook. As the study shows, millions of fans and followers and thousands of likes and retweets had no magic impact on sales!
Any doubts? Here is another figure:
A survey from a French social media agency, Isobar, explains that 74% of fans do not believe being a fan influences purchasing behavior at all.
So what’s a marketer to do?
Add another step to your social media marketing strategy: conversion.
A follow, a like, or a share is just the first step in establishing a relationship with a customer or prospect. There is another step needed to transform a fan or a follower into a customer.
Converting a fan or follower into a loyal customer involves providing personalized, relevant, and exclusive content and services to build a one to one relationship across channels. It can’t be done without an opt-in for personal communications.
Facebook is no longer free and naturally viral
Garham Mudd, Facebook’s head of Vertical Measurement, recently shared that “for the top 200 brands Facebook’s ad platform drives five times the reach that earned engagement does.” Facebook clearly depreciates earned media (virality and engagement) to paid media (ads).
Any doubts? Here is another figure:
Previously, posting messages on brand pages reached about 16% of brands’ fans; now it reaches only 7% of them. If you want to reach more than 7%, you’ll have to pay (see picture below). Facebook just divides by two the efficiency of posting messages on Facebook to reach an audience.
So what’s a marketer to do?
Add another step to your social media marketing strategy: conversion of fans and followers into opt-in prospects.
Brands must quickly secure the relationships they have created with fans and followers and invite them to continue conversations on channels they control: email, website, direct mail, SMS, etc.
To sum up
Marketers can generate a significant ROI on social media but they need to establish a next step after the “like quest” on social engagement: conversion of fans and followers into opt-in customers and orchestration of one-to-one conversations with fans on social media and across channels.