The hardest thing for most marketers and sales teams to understand is how to turn social media into a measurable, predictable tool for promoting products, services, or branding. The mystique that the powerful word-of-mouth that social media can generate (for good or ill) often creates a sort of fog-shrouded and ethereal quality to it that creates a very tough environment for analysis.
Of course, the fact that many “social media marketing experts” use and even promote this mystique doesn’t help things. Chances are, if your “expert” cannot give you solid evidence of return on investment, he or she is not only incapable of measuring it, but likely wouldn’t like the results if it were measured. The fact is, social media, when done right, can be measured relatively accurately for ROI.
The first thing is to understand and come to grips with the fact that unlike traditional advertising, social media does not have a single platform or payoff measurement, nor does it have an immediate or even directly targeted impact. In other words, it can take a long time to pay off and you may never know exactly what aspect of your social media efforts caused that payoff.
For example, the customer who came to your sales staff to purchase your widget may have been interested because of a conversation on Facebook that took place nearly a month ago and may have finalized that decision due to a conversation they weren’t even involved in, but observed, on Twitter just yesterday. Unless you ask directly (which, of course, you should, via surveys), you’ll never know what caused that sale.
So think of social media as both a long-term and a multifaceted tool. One of the greatest stories of effective social media use is from the Ford Motor Company. Over a year before the new Fiesta entered the U.S. market, Ford began an active buzz campaign called the Fiesta Movement. This involved a lot of creative marketing and sales work, promoting the car in a grassroots, viral way, that generated more than 6.5 million YouTube views, 50,000 requests for information about the vehicle from non-Ford drivers, and 10,000 cars sold in less than a week when it finally hit the U.S. market.
Other companies like PepsiCo and Levi Strauss have also used the interactive and dynamic nature of social media to promote their brands and drive sales. Individual sales persons at car dealerships, financial institutions, and many other retail and service outlets have utilized the interactive nature of social media to drive unprecedented sales figures.
Getting beyond the Facebook page or the Twitter feed is one of those things that hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs and salespeople are attempting to do every day. Yet most fail because they don’t understand how social media works, only that it can work. The good news is, understanding how it works is simple: it works because it’s interactive and if you engage your audience – not preach towards, not promote to, not sell towards, but actually engage them – then you will build a repertoire that spreads as goodwill as they share with their friends, who share with their friends, and so on.
This online word of mouth becomes phenomenal. All it requires is that you engage honestly and directly in a helpful, useful manner to your potential contacts and customers. This shows them (and their watching friends) that you are not just there to push for sales, but are actively a part of the community. Eventually, this reaches enough people that the synergy of touch points leads them through the tunnel and into a purchase. If you consider social media as a long-term branding effort and use that long-term approach in a personal way, you’ll see sales build quickly and they’ll be much easier to measure as you monitor your sales team’s engagement efforts.