How many times have you been in a conversation with someone about Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter to hear them proudly tout how many people follow, friend or connect to them? Herein lies the basic problem. After all, if you ONLY had 5 “followers” but those followers were:
- The Dali Lama
- The President of the United States
- The Queen of England
- The Pope
- Bruce Springsteen (I can’t help myself sometimes…)
wouldn’t you think that was pretty awesome? And well you might — because, it is not HOW MANY — it is WHO, how ENGAGED they are with you and whether they contribute to the GOALS you set out to meet with those Social Networking channels in the first place.
If one of the above luminaries blogged about what a terrific product/service you offered, would it not change your results, just a little? Connecting and engaging with Key Influencers online in your markets or industry is far more valuable than simply building up a large group of subscribers who have little ability to help meet your bottom-line goals.
While how many people subscribe to you is a good statistic to track, it is not usually THE definitive statistic that matters. What matters is how the people you connect with through Social Networks contribute to your goal success.
In addition to tracking THE definitive goal statistics, you’ll also want to track milestone metrics along the way (such as how many follower by channel). This will give you the raw intelligence you need for performance management. If all you track are followers, expect disappointment.
And, while I am on this topic – let’s talk about goals. Most organizations don’t set them at all as though merely the act of showing up in those networks were the goal. Those that do set goals often do not ask enough of their Social Media Marketing — aggressively connecting the actions to results will help you see where more can be acheived. Here’s a partial list of some of the goals you might consider: Sales, Lead Generation, Search Engine Ranking, Online Reputation Management, Customer Insight, Customer Support, Product/Service Research, Competitor Tracking, Thought Leadership and Brand Management. There are more.
If you’ve been holding back because you thought that it won’t work for B2B, you might want to take a look at the chart below from recent eMarketer research that reports a planned 43% increase in Social Networking spending for 2010 among B2B study respondents. You might say that getting into Social Networking and measuring your results is becoming a new competitive baseline for good business practices.
Also interesting is the strong spending increase B2B marketers project for webinars (+ 26%), a topic that we covered in Generating Internet Business Leads: Webinars — a recent podcast with Sarah Kling, Founder and CEO of UEVision. This podcast covers how her company successfully uses webinars to build a robust sales lead pipeline and the role Social Media Marketing plays in that success.
Bear in mind a basic human instinct is to trust peers, colleagues and friends more than advertisements or marketing communication from people they have no relationship with or trust established. Social Networking gives us all unprecedented ability to do just that with ease and speed.
Social Networking is steadily growing as mainstream activity for personal and professional use. Getting a measurable Social Media Marketing Strategy & Plan in place with a performance management system that tracks the right metrics is rapidly becoming an essential component of remaining competitive.
