Engagement, opportunity, conversion: 3 steps for social lead generation that still hold true

Generating leads with your social media marketing strategy is great, but how do you measure your efforts to see if you are getting a good ROI? Where does the measurement process start? It’s simple. It starts with engagement.

With lead generation, it’s crucial that you understand what drives audience participation so that you can identify what content, topics, and curated content are drawing people into the engagement level of your social media sales funnel. By using tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights, you can gather data on how people are engaging with your brand on the social web.

If you are currently tracking shares, likes, posts, re-tweets, etc, do you know which of these are directly related to a lead you are generating? Measuring social media lead generation works in three steps and could act as the base of your sales funnel:

1. Engagement
2. Opportunity
3. Conversion

Here are a couple of tips explaining this in detail.

Engagement

Lead generation with social media starts with engagement and it’s crucial at this first step to get a clear understanding of what actually drives your target audience to engage with you on the social web.

Which topics and “magnetic content” draw people in to start communicating with you? By using analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights or any other 3rd-party measurement application, you will get a very good understanding how your target audience interacts with your social media activities.

At this stage you should measure the posts, updates, retweets, mentions, and likes. Also measure the traffic you are generating from your efforts to your website or blog where you can engage with your audience on a deeper level and maybe get them to part with their email details for a signup or a free download. Take note that this is not a hard lead, but a soft one where you can nurture them back to your website on a regular basis.

Opportunity

When you are entering this stage of the funnel and you have nurtured your soft leads, measure the following to identify where your best opportunities are:

• Which website pages are visited the most
• The bounce rate of the pages that were viewed
• Time spent on each page
• Did they follow through with downloading other content?
• Not completed a contact form
• Exit pages

By measuring this, you will gain insights on how to optimise your sales funnel journey further for future visitors.

Conversion

This is the last step of the process. At this step you can also measure the ROI of your likes and tweets. The ROI outcome will depend on which industry you are in, but here are a couple of examples you can use if you want to track the number of purchases that resulted from:

• Clicking on a link on any of your social media profiles where you posed a discount coupon
• Posting a service or product on your Facebook Business Page
• Downloading content that you promoted
• A lead that was generated on LinkedIn

Generating leads on the social web doesn’t happen overnight and each campaign will have different metrics to measure. There is a chance you will get one or two that will convert immediately, but the best way to generate leads is when you nurture your target audience. This sometimes requires a lot of hard work and patience.

Measure what you are doing and your progress, adjust your campaigns where necessary, and start nurturing your leads.