Most people I know have rather mixed feelings about the efficacy of social media marketing. Some revel about having 100,000 new likes for their products, and others lament that only a portion of those 100,000 seem to actually buy anything. I haven’t come across any hard and fast numbers that showed what percentage of social media users actually bought something based on these numbers.
Most people I know have rather mixed feelings about the efficacy of social media marketing. Some revel about having 100,000 new likes for their products, and others lament that only a portion of those 100,000 seem to actually buy anything. I haven’t come across any hard and fast numbers that showed what percentage of social media users actually bought something based on these numbers.
There have been some contradictory reports showing the efficacy (or lack thereof). For example, Forrester has found that 17% of users have made a purchase based on a post they saw on a social media channel (score one for the pro-social media column), whereas a later report claimed that only 1% were online transactions (which signifies the exact opposite). So, how can the two be reconciled?
I have come across this problem with my own clients. For many of them, we started aggressive social media campaigns and saw an increase in sales but, when it came time to show them exactly what effect Facebook had on sales, the numbers were harder to come by.
At first, I tried using my old standby, Google Analytics, and I figured I would track the number of conversions that came from people starting on Facebook. I was shocked to discover that none of the sales originated on Facebook. So, for a brief moment, I had an existential crisis: maybe Facebook marketing isn’t worth it at all.
Still, sales were up and the only real difference was that we started social media. It couldn’t have been a coincidence across all my clients. So, I did a bit of digging. And that’s where I discovered something very interesting.
The number of sales that came from Facebook was zero, but the number of sales that came from people entering my clients URL directly increased—along with people who were simply searching for the client’s name. Suddenly, it all made sense.
I thought back to the way that I used Facebook, and extrapolated it to others. If I come across a product through Facebook, I probably won’t click on the link and buy it immediately; I usually remember the website and go back to it later. And, considering how I don’t like to buy anything instantaneously online, I would wait a while—sometimes weeks—returning to the website before I made a sale. So, even though my first interaction with the company was through Facebook, by the time I made a sale, it wouldn’t show up as being from Facebook at all; to an outside observer, it looks as though Facebook had no part in the sale at all.
So, what does this mean? Well, unfortunately, it means that tracking sales made through social media marketing is a lot more complicated; I don’t think you’ll ever find a true “smoking gun” that would definitively prove if an individual Facebook post led to sales. It means that you’re going to have to dig around a little deeper and view your marketing holistically when trying to measure results: if you have a seemingly “unexplained” spike that coincides with an increase in social media, social media is the likely cause. Until Google Analytics starts showing which user likes on Facebook (which will never, ever happen, for dozens of reasons), that’s the best you can do.
Social media marketing can drive sales, but it might not always look that way.
Contact New York online marketing company fishbat for information about social media services.
