Likes, Followers and B2B Marketers Adoration for Shiny Things
Let me ask you a question. If you lead a business and/or you are responsible for the marketing of your company, what is the return on 1000 Facebook likes?
Perhaps a better question is…
Did you know that only 1-5% of the people who “Like” your Facebook page actually see what you post on Facebook? Better still, only about 1.5% of those who like your Facebook page will ever return to your Facebook page?
Yet marketers clamber to get more likes. Almost obsessively as if these “Likes” can be traded in for revenue. Guess what, they can’t. At least not directly.
What about Twitter Followers. How important are they? What exactly should a business expect from increasing their followers?
While many businesses will tell you they have generated a lead or an opportunity through engaging with someone that follows them on Twitter, few can say that a higher volume of followers directly led them to more opportunities or revenue.
Measurement is Important, But We Must Measure The Right Things
Paying attention to the analytics is important. However, the key to B2B marketing is measuring the right things.
For instance, would you rather have 500 people read your blog that are in your industry and are potentially consumers of the product or service that you sell.
Or…
Would you prefer to have 50,000 readers that are just eyeballs because they have no need to consume what you are selling?
The answer is obvious, but everyday I hear marketers and business owners saying we need more people to read our content. Really, you just need the right people to read your content. This is especially true in B2B because your audience is usually very targeted.
Make Sense?
What Should B2B’s Be Measuring?
It all starts with understanding your purpose.
Why are your engaging in Social Media? Why is your company blogging? What are you trying to accomplish?
This is your digital marketing strategy. However it is important to understand these things before getting caught up in how many followers you have, who is liking your page and how many readers you have.
Those things matter once your strategy is in place, but before that it is just throwing “Stuff” at the wall and hoping something sticks.
So here are a couple of things to focus on.
Target the Right Readers/Followers: You know who the ideal customer is for your business. Focus on connecting with them through social channels and content. With the right audience your conversions will grow at a much greater rate than they will by just pursuing volume.
Don’t Count Followers and likes, Build Relationships: The counts really don’t mean that much. While they may feel good for your brands ego, a huge volume of “Window Shoppers” or worse yet unengaged followers will likely translate into nothing that matters for your business.
With so much data and information available to us, it is easy to get caught up in the hype. But our role in the digital sphere is to drive meaningful relationships that translate into customer advocates and revenue.
Make sure that your actions directly support the real goals of your business and not appearances and metrics that don’t matter.
Hey B2B businesses and Marketers! How is your business measuring content and social media marketing success? We’d love to hear from you!
Daniel Newman is the co-founder of V3*Broadsuite and is an experienced C-level executive, serving as a strategy consultant for small and mid-sized businesses. He’s also an insight/analyst partner to four Fortune 50 enterprises and previously served as the co-founder and CEO of EC3, a hosted IT and communications services provider. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of United Visual, Inc. in Chicago Illinois.
He is a widely published writer who contributes weekly to Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post and industry publications such as Commercial Integrator, Sound & Communication and Corporate Tech Decisions. He’s also author of three best-selling business books including The New Rules of Customer Engagement, The Millennial CEO, and just recently Evolve: Marketing (^as we know it) is Doomed.
Daniel has established a reputation as a leading thinker in topics such as Social, Big Data, Cloud and Mobile. He has been named to many top influencer lists in all of these areas, including recognition by the Huffington Post as one of the 100 business and leadership accounts to follow on Twitter. He is also an adjunct professor of management at North Central College.
