By Eyal Katz

For B2B sales and marketing teams, few metaphors are as powerful as the sales funnel.

It’s a near-supernatural, multi-layered vortex that pulls in leads from the wider world, then draws them down toward closing. At the top of the funnel (TOFU) are fresh new leads who are just discovering your offerings. In the middle of the funnel (MOFU) are leads who are interested to learn more. Finally, at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) are those leads who are poised and ready to make a purchase.

Modeling your sales funnel so you can better target and nurture leads at each layer is critical to increasing your conversion rate. But for accurate modeling, you need a lot of reliable data. And one major opportunity for collecting that data lies in your social media tools.

The importance of social media in marketing is unquestionable. In fact, businesses that market on social media are 40% more likely to hit their sales goals. Plus, a whopping 95% of buyers purchase from sellers who provide content that addresses their concerns and questions at each sales funnel level — and, nowadays, a lot of that content is posted on social platforms.

But the question remains: How can you measure and analyze the true impact of social activity on your sales funnel?

Here, we’ll explore what social media data is, and how you can use that data to strengthen your B2B sales funnels.

What is social media data?

Social media data (or social analytics — the terms are interchangeable) includes any information gleaned from the activity of visitors, prospects, and leads on your social media channels. Any data you obtain when someone interacts with your profile or content on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any other social media channel counts as social data.

Specific metrics can vary from platform to platform. However, the following social data points are common to all of them:

• Shares/reposts
• Likes
• Comments
• Mentions
• Impressions
• Conversions
• Clicks

Clicks can be the most revealing of all social data points. Many outside factors can determine what post a visitor might choose to comment on or share. Click metadata can tell you what types of content they would like to explore further.

Why is social media data important to B2B funnels?

You can’t analyze the efficiency of your B2B social media marketing efforts without raw data. With so many marketing activities and steps in the buyer’s journey taking place on social media, analytics without social data won’t yield many useful insights.

With social analytics, you can answer some crucial questions about whether your social media activities can help you meet your goals. Analytics help answer questions such as:

• Which social media platforms are generating the most leads?
• What kind of content is making our audience click, share, and …read more

  Source:: HubSpot Blog

        

  

  Author: Aaron