When it comes to measuring RoI from social media, people shouldn’t be failing for a lack of information, he adds: “Social media creates large amounts of data and the key for marketing professionals is making sense of this data to determine what your return actually is.” Jago-Byrne says a number of Microsoft partners are helping companies with “social listening, sentiment analysis and to track the return on their outlay”.
Returning to the channel, Cashion at ProfIT Marketing says there is a difference in the goals distributors have for social media compared to resellers, “who look to use it primarily as a lead generation tool”. She cites the example of a leading ERP reseller that uses its social media presence to keep the company “top of mind” with the parent vendor in the US. “So when ERP leads become available, it claims more than its fair share by showing how active it is in the ERP ecosystem and the parent is confident the leads are in safe hands,” she says. “In this case, social media has a clear goal and it’s easy to measure the return at the end of the year. This is how social media delivers at its best – against a clear goal.”
Views differ on what could be the most important social media channel for marketing. The survey found that 36% identified Facebook compared to 24% for LinkedIn and 21% for Twitter. Cashion quotes an Ipsos MRBI survey that found 30% of Irish people are on twitter but only one in 10 tweet every day. Channel companies need to ask themselves: “Is this the best channel to reach my targets and are they active users of this channel?”
“Traffic is your number one metric and engagements (likes, shares, re-tweets) are a brilliant indication that people like your content” – Alan Coleman, Wolfgang Digital
LinkedIn has a high concentration of professionals including reseller sales professionals, “exactly the target audience distributors are trying to reach” while Facebook is not a favourite channel for organisations in the B2B sector but Cashion has seen “larger multinational organisations use it very effectively for support and recruitment purposes”.
She warns distributors to be “very careful in terms of balancing resource allocation across social media and other awareness and educational roles it fulfils for the reseller channel”. While social media has its place in the marketing communications mix, “companies have to be realistic about what they want to achieve from it and allocate resource against it appropriately”.
Coleman describes social media as “the champion of audience targeting”. Facebook allows companies to target people by industry, income or whether they’ve just started a new job while LinkedIn allows them to target by job title, such as IT managers in Ireland, while Twitter gives them the chance to go for users of related accounts.
In Hayes’ case, it’s mainly Twitter and LinkedIn. Envisage Cloud often taps into its main vendor partner, Sage, for content. “We can share and like and use its content,” she says. The company also creates its own content, often through a blog which it shares through Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube. “We’re trying to get more subscribers to the blog and more followers on Twitter and LinkedIn. We follow people that we’d like to attract and hopefully they’ll follow us back.”
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers