The Social Media Conversion Funnel and ROI
The naysayers are everywhere proclaiming There is no ROI in social media. There are others proclaiming how successful and profitable social media is. So, which one is it?
The answer lies in the social media conversion funnel. When it comes to creating a funnel analysis (made popular in Web Analytics) for social marketing, there are at least two very different funnels available.
The best way to examine the two different funnels is to think of in-person social interactions. I prefer to use a dating analogy.
In this funnel, organizations expect that a tweet, a blog post, or aFacebook status update with a link in it will drive their fans and followers to click on the link and covert. They can measure click-through rates, conversation rates, and calculated URL much in the same way agency have been doing for years with direct mail/email marketing.
Unfortunately, just like going to a bar to meet people, few will get instantly lucky, and for those who do, rarely is there more engagement than a one night stand with limited lifelong customer value.
This funnel has a minimum of four stages all revolving around relationship building. The goals of organizations who implement this strategy are commitment relationships and being there for the long haul with their customers.
Just as in the physical world, this is where you meet people and establish weak connections. Perhaps you met someone at an actual party, a conference, a networking event, or online at during a TwitterChat, or followed them from a link in an article you read and so on.
You have limited reasons to trust this person with anything more than a business card and your contact points. You then take this information and add them to you contacts on LinkedIn, follow them on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, add them to a G+ circle, etc. If neither of you actively takes the relationship to next level, nothing more will happen in the conversion funnel.
By adding them to your on-line social network (step 1), you can now move the relationship to the next level: building trust. This is established with communication. Each of you can see and monitor thebehaviorand knowledge of the other. Is he or she the person you thought they were when you first met them? Do you start trusting that person as a subject matter expert? When you do, youre ready to take the relationship to the next step in the funnel.
Do all first dates go well? Of course not! This is the point in the relation where you feel each other. Is there a mutual attraction or does it appear that they want a one-sided relationship? Are they going for the hard sell? When talking to them do you pay more attention to your smartphone or look up and count the holes in the ceiling tiles in your office? Typical signs of a social media first date would include a product demo or a phone conversation about service or a product offered.
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The Social Media Conversion Funnel and ROI