Are You Tracking Your Social Media Data?

Oktopost illustration
James T Fletcher
CEO, Principal Consultant

30/7/2019

More and more of us are incorporating social media into our marketing strategies and promoting our brands and our companies on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (among others) – find out how to get more from your social media strategy

Social media is a key component of any up-to-date digital marketing strategy. It’s no wonder, since we all know the importance of generating leads across our multi-channel marketing efforts and going beyond email campaigns.

Whether it’s for brand awareness or for lead generation, social media gives marketers an expanded audience and reaches leads on their own turf, so to speak. It’s an easy channel for conversations to take place and for building trust between your leads and your marketing team, with no pressure on leads to commit time (or cash!) to your company – until they are ready to do so.

In fact, here are a few stats to highlight just how important social media is to a successful digital marketing strategy:

  • 84% of C-level and VP executives and 75% of B2B buyers use social media to guide their purchasing decisions
  • 80% of social marketers said that their key strategy is to increase engagement across social channels.
  • 73% of marketers believe that their efforts through social media marketing have been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their business by netting them qualified leads

However, while we all agree on how important social networks are, many of us aren’t tracking social media engagement data, and most of us could do a better job of integrating these key analytics into our campaigns and our strategy.  

Case in point: lead activity currently being tracked by platforms like Marketo, Eloqua, and Act-On generally comes from just three major data sources: website, email, and data synced with your CRM platform (for example, Salesforce). 

If we overlook key social media data, we can easily get a skewed view of our lead management efforts – and of the ROI of our marketing strategy.

Here are just a few social media statistics you can – and should – be tracking from your social media channels:

  • Lead generation – how many leads are your posts creating
  • Lead engagement – how often your leads are engaging with your content, where they are engaging with it, and how they are sharing or interacting with it
  • Conversions – which social posts and shared content leads to clicks and conversions across the full range of your social media activities

This wealth of data is why it’s so important to integrate your social media platforms and your marketing automation. Translating behavior into actionable data will let you see the true worth of your efforts by providing accurate marketing attribution and showing you which sources or touchpoints converted your lead and landed a sale.

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The importance of this data goes well beyond conversion rates:

  • Having a clear picture of how your leads interact with you on social media will allow you to optimise your lead scoring systems and lead qualification by letting you see what your best-quality leads are doing so that you can do more of what works (and even automate your lead qualification and lead scoring by assigning points using your marketing automation platform)
  • It will also allow you to feed that information directly into your lead nurturing campaigns so that you can provide the right messages and content at the right stages of engagement for each lead and refine your lead nurturing strategy
  • Social media data is crucial to clear reporting of your marketing efforts and provides necessary information to create, back, or adjust your digital marketing strategy

It can be tricky to make sure your social media data is being captured into your marketing automation platform, but there are tools that you can use to make the task easier! Here at JTF Marketing, we’ve partnered with Oktopost and use Oktopost for our social media data management and tracking. 

Oktopost makes day-to-day campaigns easy (making marketing tasks easier by allowing marketers to post across all their social media platforms simultaneously and to set up separate social media campaigns within the platform) and provides key analytics, from the global level (showcasing the results of your overall publishing campaigns) to the granular (providing data on engagement per individual posts and content). 

And, most importantly, Oktopost integrates easily with all major marketing automation platforms (including Marketo) – no need for complicated data transfers or endless csv files.

Don’t leave your hard social media work out of your reporting! Make sure you integrate your social media data into your marketing automation platform so you can create meaningful customer relationships across all marketing channels, improve your marketing attribution, track your metrics, and measure your success across the entire marketing and sales funnel and all your omnichannel campaigns.

We’d like to thank our partners at Oktopost for providing background and context for this blog post and for partnering with us to provide a social media engagement platform.  All opinions on this post are our own.