Social Media Drives Results

The purpose of social media is not be good t social media. The purpose of social media is to be good at business and to simple use social media to get there.

All too often, small business owners lose sight of that. They get caught up in superficial measures of fans and followers. As the numbers grow, they pat themselves on the back, and think they have this ‘social media thing” down.

But when we really ask the tough questions, we are disappointed in the answers we get. In our 2012 small business, social media survey, we asked business owners what percentage of their web traffic and sales come from social media. In both cases more than 25% of the small business owners we surveyed didn’t know and another 25% for web and 35% for sales responded that social media accounted for less than 5% of their results.

If you are a “glass half empty” kind of person, you might conclude that social media doesn’t work, or that there is no way to measure it. But if you are like me, with a “glass half full” perspective, you will point to the 45 – 50% of business owners who are seeing results ranging from 6% to 76% of their total web lead and sales volume.

Social media does drive results, so if you are in one of two groups, the “I don’t know” or the “Less than 5%” you have some work ahead of you.

If you spending time on social media, but you don’t know what kind of traffic is coming to your website, you need to start measuring today.

• Install Google analytics, Wordpress stats or webtrends
• Look at the referring sites to see where you traffic is coming from . What creates more traffic for you; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+, Pinterest or email?
• Stop driving traffic just to your home page. Instead create specific landing pages or blog posts with unique offers so you can begin to see what your social traffic is interested in. This gives you the opportunity to tweak offers in response to successful campaigns.

If you are spending time on social media and you are tracking your response, but you are not getting the results i is easy to say that social media doesn’t work. But the survey shows that it does for more than 50% of the business owners who participated in the study. If it is working for them, and it is not working for you, maybe the problem is you and not social media. Take a hard look at your content.

• Make a concerted effort to talk to people not at them.
• Engage by asking questions, and responding to the questions of others.
• Share content created by others so you become perceived as a resource and subject matter expert.
• Look for people to follow. Consider following people in your industry or people who are talking about things in which you are interested. Use a program like twitter alerts to find conversations which you can make a contribution to.
• Don’t just broadcast one bland update entitled New Blog Post from each day. If you don’t share anything else of value, no one will pay attention to this.

If you are not getting the results you want, start doing a little research. Look at what your competitors are doing. Follow several social media experts, and take the time to read their blogs. Start asking questions, and try a few different approaches.

If this sounds like too much work, you can simply stop playing around with social media completely. But if you choose that alternative, recognize that the business will pass you by.

Intrigued by the statistics in this blog post? Want to learn more? You can download the white papers from our 2011 study here. And we would really appreciate your help with our 2012 study. We are still collecting data, and the survey will only take a few minutes. Click here to share how your company is using social media. We want to know how you are using social media, and in return we will send you a copy of the 2012 study when it is ready.

There are leads to be gleaned from social media. Do you have your share?