Sales and Web Traffic from Social Media; Social Media Q&A

Social media marketing questions, we get lots of them. We have our own too. We love learning and sharing what we learn. So here are some recent social media questions and answers that we hope will help you too.

Q1: Were you able to see a direct link to increase in sales after your efforts with social media engagement?

A1: There’s no simple answer to this. The short answer is yes, we have led campaigns that were designed to drive sales – Facebook gift car stores, Twitter discounts and incentives, online crowdsourcing contests such as “design your own product,” were all very effective at driving direct retail sales.

But not all social media efforts have sales as an objective, neither is it realistic to put all sales eggs in the social media basket.  Marketing evaluation should also look at cost per acquisition, or cost per retention, depending on objective.

All marketing will have a price tag and when done right will drive results, the question is, where do you get most bang for the buck. So you may spend a million dollars on a TV ad and get 100 sales, or spend $10,000 and get 50 sales. Which would you rather do?

Q2: Did you see a relationship to website traffic because of social media?

A2: Oh yes! Social media channels are the 2nd source of traffic (after organic search results) for most businesses that engage in social media marketing.  A side-by-side test of banner ads and blogger relations (inviting guest bloggers) showed both strategies drove similar incoming traffic but the social media spend was much lower. In fact, all social media campaigns we implemented last year resulted in increased web traffic, on average of 40%.

These results are not arbitrary, it takes:

1. Appealing content so we have something to link to
2. Building a social media audience so that we’ll have a critical mass of followers who would see our content and links to the website
3. An attractive narrative, so that people would see a benefit in visiting your site.

As you can see, building traffic to a website is a purposeful and multi-disciplinary effort. If you’d like to read more about how to build website traffic with social media, read our case study about group blogging.

Have a nagging question? Send us a message or post it in the comments below.