is social media failing to produce business leads?
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Is Social Media Failing to Produce Business Leads?TRANSCRIPT
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Social Media
Is Social Media Failing to Produce Business Leads?
BY ADAM OSTROWJUL 15, 2010
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, whereMashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media andtechnology in small business.
Former President of CBS News Andrew Heyward wrote in the Harvard BusinessReview last year that "every company is a media company,” summarizing theidea that marketing is shifting to an environment where advertisers need toproduce compelling content in order to succeed.
Recent data suggests that this is indeed the case, and that looking at social mediaservices like Twitter and Facebook strictly as lead generation tools might becounter-productive, especially for companies that focus on business-to-businesssales.
LeadForce1, an online marketing automation service provider, studied websitevisitor data for 218 companies with a social media presence from Februarythrough April of this year. The results overwhelmingly showed that visitors who
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arrived at corporate websites via Twitter and Facebook engaged mostly withcontent – specifically a company’s blog – as opposed to exploring products orsubmitting a contact us form.
Diving into the numbers, when users arrive from Twitter, they are more than sixtimes more likely to view a blog post than a contact us form. When they arrivevia Facebook, the ratio isn’t quite as high, but nonetheless, blog posts and acompany’s about page make up the bulk of user visits. About 63% of all of thevisitors from both Twitter and Facebook look at only a single page.
The conclusion, then, from LeadForce1 is that “Facebook and Twitter do notbring in Leads - these can be used as channels to engage with your existingcustomers, media, or other stakeholders, or for nurturing existing prospects, butnot as a medium for generating leads.” With the vast majority of businesses stillnot measuring the ROI of their social media efforts, that might be seen as adiscouraging data point.
However, I would argue that such a conclusion is short sighted, since it doesn’tmeasure the ongoing impact that engaging with customers and producing qualitycontent can have on the long-term growth of your company. It doesn’t take intoaccount a fundamental principle of social media marketing — the one thatHeyward summarized so well in his statement about the evolution of advertising.
The stats are also a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy – as marketers become moresavvy and use social media for conversation and content as opposed to solelydirect sales and lead generation, it would make sense that the majority of referraltraffic from social media sites is going to content as opposed to product pages andsubmission forms.
Thus, the thing to keep in mind is that while linking your audience to a blog postmight not translate directly to a sale, it might translate to a blog subscription, aretweet, or a share on Facebook. And that audience – which will grow with everyquality piece of content you produce — can be re-engaged down the line withnews about your products or special offers that directly drive sales.
While social media shouldn’t be thought of in the same fashion as moretraditional forms of marketing where lead generation happens at the point ofarrival, it would be a mistake to write it off as simply a communications tool withno direct correlation to new customer opportunities.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, temniy
TOPICS: BUSINESS, BUSINESS LISTS, FACEBOOK, LEADGENERATION, SOCIAL MEDIA, TWITTER
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