Measuring Social Success in a B2B World — 10 Key Takeaways

B2B social media success is about more than just likes and shares. That was just one of the key takeaways from Measuring Social Success in a B2B World, a panel discussion hosted by LEWIS PR as part of Social Media Week London and AMEC Measurement Month.

The panel, led by Giles Peddy, were Lance Concannon, Michelle Urwin, and Gugs Sarna.

Watch Measuring Social Success in a B2B World on Periscope, or read on for highlights.

1. Education is still the biggest social media challenge…

It may be 2015, but that doesn’t mean social media is well understood at every level of business. The panelists agreed that education is the biggest social media challenge they face.

Michelle Urwin, UKI Marketing Manager at Basware (and reformed social media skeptic) commented that, “Marketers don’t necessarily understand how to sell it into the business, yet buy-in for social has to come from the top down. Another challenge is it’s difficult to prove ROI — it’s not easy to prove that the lead you got was driven from a tweet.”

2. …Which is why training is essential

Lance Concannon, Sysomos UK Marketing Manager and technology journalist, noted that while many businesses have seen how the world has changed and want to get involved with social media, they are not sure how to get the best value from their investment. Training is essential for these businesses to unlock the value of social.

3. Integrating marketing, PR, social and email is essential

The old, siloed model is finally on the way out as marketing, PR, social media and email are overlapping more and more. And that’s a good thing. Gugs Sarna, Head of LEWIS Pulse UK explained: “A press release can’t just be a press release anymore. It’s important to consider SEO for increased search visibility, plus creating short-form content like video and podcasts will affect the distribution and success of the press release.”

4. Success has to be visible to all levels of business

Social media is most successful when there’s buy-in from all levels of the business, from the marketing team, to sales, and to the very top. However, all of these teams have different priorities and different ideas of how social media should be working for them. Lance noted it is essential to speak the language of business, saying “Instead of feeding back to the business, ‘Our latest Facebook post got 500 likes,’ you have to connect it to traditional business ROI.” Michelle added: “We find social advocates within the team, and get them to engage in social first. Once the others in the team see the results they’re getting, it’s easier for them to engage with social media as well.”

To encourage sales teams to engage with social media, Michelle often ‘gamifies’ the process, linking social media conversations to a sales team’s KPI. “As soon as you tell them that part of their KPIs are to start, say, ten conversations on LinkedIn, they’ll do it, no problem. As soon as social media has a buy in from the top, adoption goes up.”

5. Social Media leads are important — but they’re not the only thing

Leads are the most obvious proof of social media ROI. Lance noted most businesses know how much a lead is worth. “It’s relatively straightforward to measure the effect of social on the marketing funnel. For example, if a blog post gets 100 shares, it might reach 10,000 eyeballs. 10% of those will come back to the website and download a whitepaper — 5% of those will request a product demo… It’s a complicated chain, but we can measure it.”

However, leads aren’t the only metric. Customer retention and customer service are also very important. Lance continued: “If a customer has a poor experience, engages through social, and you handle that well, you have a better chance of keeping that customer. Using social media to reduce customer churn makes a real difference to the bottom line.”

6. There’s no such thing as the perfect social media metric

What’s most important: a like, a share, a click, or a lead? What measurements you use to track your social media campaign depends on the goals of the business. Your client may be looking to drive sales or improve brand sentiment, or nurture influencer relations.

Gugs noted that “It’s not about the right measurements, it’s about the right measurements for the client.”

Michelle added that she also takes the relevance of the audience into account. “There’s no point in having 20,000 followers if 19,000 are uninterested in and unengaged with the brand and products.”

7. Measurement creates better results

Measurement isn’t just about looking back — taking the measure of a past campaign can make the next more successful.

Gugs says: “Before beginning any campaign we need to forecast how we think things will behave. When the campaign is running, we can tweak things as needed to improve performance. In that way, we forecast as well as looking back. With good data you’re able to use it to increase performance.”

8. Mobile comes first

Mobile traffic has overtaken desktop traffic. Because of this, Gugs says “We think digital first, always.” This can be as simple as increasing the size of call-to-action buttons to ensure they’re easy to use on a mobile device, to redesigning an entire website to be responsive.

9. B2B can engage with social media trends

Fast-moving and new social media such as WhatsApp and SnapChat are thought of as the domain of B2C, but Michelle noted that more and more B2B brands are experimenting with them. Gugs said that Periscope really lends itself to B2B events. “Livestreaming will continue to be important, which is great because it’s really measurable.” Speaking from his role as Sysomos marketing manager, Lance said they have been “Thinking a lot about visuals in social media. Images and video are big, and that’s currently a problem for brands because people don’t tag their images properly so brands can’t see that user generated content.”

10. The future is data-driven

With more and more social media tools — and teams which understand how best to use them — the future is becoming more data driven. That doesn’t mean we can lose sight of common sense. Some things, like great customer service, are difficult to measure — but that doesn’t make them less important!

Watch the recording of Measuring Social Success in a B2B World:

Tags: event, measurement, PR

Originally published at blog.lewispr.com.