What really matters in social media is conversions – not impressions or clicks. The quantity of shares and clicks received from a particular social media network does not necessarily generate any sales or leads. Awareness of this fact is why you will be hearing a lot about Social Selling from 2014 on.
Social Selling
After years of arguing over how to measure Social Media ROI, new tools are emerging that are affordable for small businesses and freelancers. Now our challenge is that there are so many of these new tools we don’t know which to choose.
While there are hundreds of social media related tools, not many of them measure what social network is generating actual sales and leads. At 36 minutes into this video you can see why this is so important:
Video Highlights:- At 36:00 minutes in it is clear that even though LinkedIn drives very little traffic, it generates 22% conversions.
- Notice the large number of posts and clicks it took to generate 58 conversions.
- Ability to see actions by specific share.
- How misleading using clicks only really are.
- Click vs conversion reports let you know where to spend your time and effort.
Why You Need a Dashboard
Social media solutions for measuring effectiveness by network typically include a dashboard. They are a combination of social scheduling, integration with social media platforms, analytics and possibly alerts.
Dashboards allow you to organize data into actionable views. Knowing this, the place to start in choosing social media related tools is to find a dashboard to integrate all your data in one place.
Cyfe
For small businesses, Cyfe provides an All-in-One business dashboard. The easiest way to understand what it does is to watch this video:
Video Highlights- Pulls data from social media, analytics, marketing, sales and support into multiple customizable dashboards.
- Monitor individual departments, campaigns, projects, and multiple websites.
- Integrates with Google Analytics, Facebook, spreadsheets, websites, and email solutions including AWeber, Constant Contact, GetResponse, gMail, iContact and MailChimp
- Built in keyword ranking tool
- Past data is archived
- Share dashboards via public URLs or download in .png, .jpg or .csv formats
- 60 second setup
Cyfe offer free accounts with no expiring trials, no contracts, and no credit card required so any small business can use it. The best way is to just jump in with both feet. Here are some tutorials to help you get started:
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Track Keyword Rankings and Backlinks on an All-in-One SEO Dashboard
- Monitoring Your SEO Clients with Cyfe
Oktopost
To track what social media actions are generating income, the social media specific lead generation tracking tool shown in the first video above may be what you need.
Although they focus on being a B2B solution, any business with leads or sales they can track could use it. Oktopost is the first social media tool I’ve seen that focuses on publishing and measuring social selling content and conversions.
The first video in this post shows how Oktopost is used and these two reviews contain comprehensive details about the features and capabilities:
“The platform’s [Oktopost] auto-posting and advanced message scheduling features help marketers save time, while the advanced analytics and straightforward interface make it incredibly easy for new users to get started.” ~ Stephanie Miles in Oktopost Review – Sophisticated Social Media Marketing
“Oktopost is the first platform I’ve found that really focuses on LinkedIn. While the platform includes Twitter, Facebook and G+, it has been built from the ground up to maximize your ability to leverage social media marketing on LinkedIn. For B2B sales & marketing teams, this alone makes Oktopost worthy of testing.” ~ Tom Martin in Measuring The ROI of Your Social Media Marketing
Oktopost integrates with Salesforce, Act-on, Marketo, Bitly, Feedly, GotoWebinar and Google Analytics. [Tom Martin mentions HubSpot, but they aren’t listed on the Oktopost integration page.] They offer a free trial with no credit card required. If you have sales and leads you want to measure, Oktopost is definitely worth looking into.
GetResponse
While most of us probably think of GetResponse as an email marketing solution, they have expanded into providing mobile responsive landing page creation and provide integrated email analytics. Their analytics integrates with Google Analytics.
Cyfe provides a dashboard GetResponse widget to integrate your email marketing into your overall business dashboard.
By combining GetResponse for your email marketing and landing page creation with Cyfe for overall tracking and Oktopost for social media tracking, a small business would have similar tools to what Enterprise (big brands) are using at an affordable cost.
