Posted by Justin Cambria on Fri, Jul 30, 2010
Hey y’all. I'm Justin Cambria, new to the Pull Marketing Blog, and 
a Digital Marketing Strategist here at PNP. So I try to help our clients – and our company – with online marketing strategy. Utilizing the HubSpot CMS, I develop and execute digital marketing strategies using a comprehensive program of quality content creation, clever keyword placements, social media marketing, and blogging for business. Glad to be here with you all!
Facebook...
So… Facebook. It’s a 10,000 lb upstart gorilla in the internet world, which holds clear relevance to online marketing by virtue of its size alone. If you are a business that’s at all serious about your reach, you need to be on Facebook. There are vast resources available about how to do so and Facebook for Business Best Practices, so I won’t go into that today.
Why Facebook matters to Social Media Marketing
I’d like to focus on why Facebook has value, and to what extent that value can be measured for an individual business. As an example, we maintain a PullNotPush Facebook page. This holds value for us for several reasons: Google indexes Facebook pages, which helps search engine optimization, and since Facebook is a highly trafficked site, their links tend to perform well on Google searches. Also, we want to be able to be found and ‘liked’ by clients and partners within Facebook. And we want to share the content we publish in the Facebook channel. It’s an essential place to maintain an active presence, in large part because you are giving away a free marketing opportunity. All of this is undoubtedly good for us.
Can you measure its worth?
But one of the burning questions is how good is it, and how do you measure that value? If you are utilizing Facebook for its Public Relations potential, there’s little to debate. But speaking solely of sales revenue, it’s less clear. We are fortunate enough to work with HubSpot, we use some of their awesome tools to track how effective Facebook and other social media sites are in helping us to convert leads. Here's a snapshot of a client's Social Media traffic, which shows leads from Facebook specifically:
As practitioners of closed loop marketing, we believe strongly in the value of bringing visitors back to our website; if we can’t publish content that’s thought provoking enough for people to visit our site and give us permission to contact them, we’re in the wrong business.
But what'$ a Like REALLY worth?
Discussing some of this yesterday with Michelle from the digital strategy firm LoveTheCool, we spent some time pondering how to quantify the value of Facebook likes in terms of actual sales for B2C businesses, such as musicians who might want to sell MP3s directly to their followings on Facebook .
This is a harder question to answer. Some of the URL shortening services designed for Twitter such as bit.ly offer analytics tools: you can shorten the same URL (say, a link to an amazon MP3 sale page) many times repurposing each for a specific Facebook promotion. Then clicks on each link could be tracked a-la-carte. While that is a nice and useful feature, there is not, to my knowledge, a comprehensive way to demonstrate that having X number of fans, and posting Y times per day about album Z translates into N revenue. And there's clearly a demand for that
Convert Leads & Close the Loop!
As Facebook, which is likely working on a solution to this analytics issue, catches up, we see it as another argument extolling the benefits of closed loop marketing, which culminates by converting leads. Give your followers the option of consuming your content wherever they like – on your blog, at your Facebook page, or elsewhere – but get them to come back to your page and convert if you want to offer them something specific and continue a deeper dialogue. This is especially relevant to B2B business, or any business with a consultative approach to its services. Isolating that interaction out and making it one on one on your website will help you to qualify your leads and spend time only with prospects who are genuinely interested in interacting with you.
How do you use Facebook for business? Are you frustrated by proving its value? Drop a comment!