Twitter vs Facebook: where is the proven ROI in social media?
It's tough for companies to invest the time in social networking strategies unless the path to ROI is clear. What are a few successful tactics you've seen in social media that actually drive business outcomes? Listen as our expert panelists wrestle with questions like these on the Astadia Cloud Computing Forum podcast.
- Steven Woods Eloqua
- Matt Glazer Obama Campaign
- Karin Pindle Astadia, Inc.
Steven Woods:
The individual within the sales organization will identify an organization they want to go after. They will find the key people on LinkedIn (usually). They will then identify whether those people are active in any other social media properties. And use that as a starting point for the conversation.
Instead of a phone call, where no executive wants to pick up, if someone is active on LinkedIn, on Twitter, they have their own blog, any of those gives you an angle to say, "I've learned this about you and your organization. Here's an idea of how we can help." And get that initial in.
Whereas picking up the phone and calling them? Likely will just go to a gatekeeper or to voicemail.
We've seen that time and time again, the ability to use social media to identify points of interest and ways of connecting with senior executives, VP and C level executives. And making the leap directly to top line meetings and revenue. Many times.
Karin Pindle:
With LinkedIn in the past, for instance, we created a group there. And they have a company section.
So if I want to go online and just look at Nike's information on LinkedIn, I can find out some basic information, their chief officer, people who have recently joined the company or been promoted. You can get an idea where people are coming from that are going to Nike, that are leaving Nike, revenue if they want to post it there, and so on.
We actually had our own company page and group. And one of our customers went onto our group, then joined the group, and then a couple of weeks later he said, "I want to tap into another area of the software. How can I go about purchasing it?" He actually did a little recommendation for us right there on LinkedIn. And we actually were able to close the deal.
That right there is ROI on a very minimal effort to get that LinkedIn contact group set up and maintained.
With Wikipedia, when someone goes to Yahoo or Google and searches for almost anything, if there is a Wikipedia page for it, it's typically on the first page of listings for that search engine. If you can get your business listed on Wikipedia, that's just another way to drive people from a search engine to Wikipedia to your website. It's an area you don't want to miss out on.
With Facebook, it's a little different, and MySpace as well. I used to think that MySpace was a great avenue because of how many users they have there. But being a MySpace and Facebook user myself, I've come to realize that Facebook is more where I see businesses benefitting. MySpace is still very social-driven, music driven, but not as much social networking. I think that's the key.
Facebook has come out with this Social Connect tool. That is going to allow businesses to have a login on their website to Facebook. There's a ton of business benefits for that as far as trackability of what those clients or prospects are doing on Facebook, and on their website. Also business networking. At Astadia we have our Astadia group. A lot of employees have joined it. People outside Astadia as well who want to hear what Astadia is posting about, what our tips are of the week, and then collaborate with us with what their thoughts are on topics. We'll post questions related to the businesses we work with. It's great for them to be engaged with that.
It also helps us to get a look at the demographics of people who are interested in our services. So you can use it as an analytics tool to a degree to assess the types of people that are interested in your business, what are their typical extracurricular activities, male, female, ages, and so on.
These are different platforms where you can get information now. You used to have to go out and pay an agency to do those surveys for you and get that information.
Steven Woods:
The way to think about it is to ignore the fact that it's a technology. And if you think about something like Twitter as a technology and say "are there any ways that we can analyze, that we can automate?" then you're going down the wrong path.
If you think about it as a human to human way of connecting, like a networking event, a cocktail party, that's your best bet.
And you're dealing with humans there. So find common points of interest, understand what topics they'll be interested in based on what you know about them, what you see on their LinkedIn profile, on their Facebook, on the pages you can access through their Twitter profile. And just engage them in conversation.
That is, as mundane as it might seem, the most effective tactic. Using the technologies to engage in a human to human interaction in a social sense. And you open up the dialogue there. From that dialogue, if you have a product that adds value, you can engage in a sales conversation.
But at a networking event, you wouldn't start right on Minute One with your sales pitch. Or you wouldn't get anywhere in that conversation.
Same thing holds in social media. You've got to engage on a person to person level first. And bring in the business element second. If you do that you can be very successful.
