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Social selling has emerged as a powerful strategy for B2B organizations to engage with prospects, build relationships, and drive sales. However, measuring the ROI and maximizing the effectiveness of social selling efforts remains a challenge for many businesses. To effectively gauge the success of social selling initiatives, you need to employ robust analytics and track your prospects as they move through your sales funnel.

This is where your average social media management platform falls short. Since the majority of these platforms are created for B2C social media management, they lack the capabilities needed for both B2B businesses and social selling initiatives, making it nearly impossible to quantify your efforts.

This article aims to illuminate the key metrics essential for grasping the influence of social selling on revenue alongside the insights required to refine and enhance your social selling tactics for optimal results.

Why most social media management platforms fall short

When you work in revenue, making quota is your #1 priority.

So, how do you know that the connections you’re making on social media are leading you toward that goal and drawing you closer to hitting your revenue targets? Unlike traditional sales methods, social selling operates in the realm of digital interactions and relationships, making ROI assessment more nuanced.

To successfully implement social selling, you should make sure to track essential data.

4 types of data you should track to improve social selling ROI

1. Lead Generation: Measuring the number and quality of leads generated through social channels and understanding which content, network, and revenue team member is responsible for bringing them in.
2. Intent Data: Monitoring likes, shares, comments, and other forms of engagement to better understand where your customers are in the funnel, what topics interest them, and how likely they are to make a purchase.
3. Conversion Rates: Measuring how many leads progress through the sales funnel and eventually convert into customers.
4. Revenue Attribution: Determining the revenue directly attributable to social selling efforts.

In contrast, your typical B2C social media management platform may track the following:

1. Likes and Shares: Reflects the popularity and virality of content among consumers.
2. Comments and Mentions: Provides insights into consumer interactions and sentiment towards the brand.
3. Follower Growth: Indicates the brand’s ability to attract and retain followers over time.
4. Click-Through Rate (CTR): Measures the effectiveness of content in driving traffic to a website or landing page.

These metrics are great if you’re a B2C social media marketer trying to see how your content matches up to the latest fad, but they fails to get the deep insights sellers need to win more deals through social selling.

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Get deeper insights into social selling wins with a specialized platform

This is where dedicated B2B social media management platforms like Oktopost come into play. It’s a common misconception that social media management platforms are just for marketers. But, as LinkedIn continues to be a crucial tool for building trust and connecting with potential clients, it’s clear that revenue teams also need to tap into the power of social media, specifically, LinkedIn social selling to stay competitive.

To really make a mark with social selling, understanding the content that captivates your audience, pinpointing their challenges, knowing the perfect time to reach out, recognizing their stage in the sales funnel, and seeing how your social efforts translate into revenue are key. This is where a platform tailored for B2B interactions, like Oktopost, becomes invaluable. It offers detailed insights and metrics that shed light on these critical areas, helping you fine-tune your approach to social selling and achieve better outcomes.

5 insights Oktopost provides to improve social selling ROI

Conversions

Oktopost allows businesses to convert analytics with precision. These insights enable your organizations to optimize social selling strategies for maximum effectiveness.

Integration capabilities

Oktopost seamlessly integrates with popular CRM systems like Salesforce, enabling automatic syncing of social data with customer records. This integration simplifies the lead management workflow, allowing your revenue team to gain a holistic understanding of their accounts and opportunities. It incorporates social media interactions, clearly showing the customer’s journey from initial engagement to closed-won deals.

Lead intelligence with social intent data

Utilizing social intent data from various social media platform interactions provides deep insights into prospects’ preferences and intentions to purchase. Oktopost enables the integration of this data into their B2B social media management platform, ensuring it reaches the appropriate members of your revenue team.

This facilitates the creation of personalized engagement strategies that match content and solutions to the specific interests of each customer. Tailoring interactions in this way not only boosts your chances of closing deals but also accelerates the process of meeting revenue targets.

Influenced opportunities

Understanding the impact of your social selling efforts is crucial, and measuring influenced opportunities is a vital part of this process. This metric evaluates both the engagement of potential sales accounts with your content and the revenue resulting from these interactions. By tracking this, you can effectively highlight the tangible benefits of social selling, directly linking it to your company’s financial outcomes.

Campaign tracking and attribution

Oktopost enables granular tracking of campaigns, attributing leads and conversions to specific social activities. This level of detail empowers you to assess the performance of individual social selling initiatives, so you know which topics interest your prospects and how to drive conversations to increase win rates.

Start empowering your revenue team with impactful social selling data

Social selling has become a cornerstone strategy for driving growth and fostering customer relationships. However, realizing the full potential of social selling requires more than just posting content and engaging with prospects. It demands a systematic approach to measurement and analysis, which is best achieved through dedicated B2B social media management platforms.

By leveraging the advanced analytics, integration capabilities, and compliance features of Oktopost, B2B organizations can accurately measure the ROI of their social selling efforts and make data-driven decisions to optimize performance.

Learn more about Oktopost’s analytics capabilities and how they’ll enable you to maximize the business impact of social media.