68% of brands across the world are using social media to generate high-quality leads for their business. Whether you are a SaaS company offering financial tools or an eCommerce brand selling marshmallows online, social media is the place to get more clients.
When used right, social media can become your primary lead-generation tool. In this article, we’ll dive deep into how you can analyze your social media lead generation and make the right moves to derive the true value social platforms can provide for your business: customers.
But first,
What is Social Media Lead Generation?
Social media lead generation is exactly what it sounds like: generating leads using social channels. This could mean creating impeccable content to attract new followers or marketing campaigns for your app on social media.
The end goal is to get important contact information for reaching out to these future potential clients. The social media lead generation cycle follows a specific path down the conversion funnel:
- Engagement
- Opportunity
- Conversion
Moving from the top down, let’s understand how you can analyze and improve your ROI (return on investment) by making the right moves. At Growth Hackers, we helped a B2B SaaS client scale social media lead generation across LinkedIn and Reddit campaigns, increasing qualified leads by 42% while improving cost per lead efficiency within a single quarter.
Engagement | 7 Key Metrics
Social media engagement metrics show how often your audience participates (interacts) with your lead-generation content. Besides showing user engagement, these robust metrics also send strong signals to social media algorithms, which help you reach even more prospects.
Below are eight key social media metrics you want to track and analyze:
1. Engagement Rate
The engagement rate is the percentage measure of the number of engagements (likes, reactions, comments, and shares), your content gets. For some, this may mean calculating the engagement rate in relation to your follower count. For others, it’s the total engagement action.
There are numerous ways to track this metric. The most common formula is:
Total engagement action / Total Followers X 100 = Average engagement rate.
2. Amplification Rate
Amplification rate is an accurate measure of how your followers take the content and share it through their network: the ratio of shares per post to total follower count. A higher amplification rate means your followers are expanding your reach.
Amplification rate can be tracked using this simple formula:
Total post shares/ total followers X 100 = Amplification Rate Percentage
3. Reach and Impressions
Reach is the number of people who view your content, and impression is how often your content is seen. Analyzing these two metrics for each individual post, story, and video, as well as your page and overall profile, is crucial for accurately measuring your growth.
A valuable asset of this metric is to see what percentage of your reach and impression is made up of followers and non-followers. A higher non-follower percentage shows that your content is performing well in the eyes of both algorithm and audience.
By creating compelling and valuable content, you can transform these non-followers into followers and then leads.
4. Link Tracking on Social Media
Link tracking on social media answers exactly how the leads found you. It involves tracking the number of clicks on specific links to your posts and stories. This helps you analyze if the prospects are clicking on links associated with your social media ads.
Link tracking and advertising analytics give you vital insights into your social media lead generation performance. It helps improve eCommerce conversion rate, letting you understand the customer journey and track which source of social media traffic is bringing the most visitors to your lead conversion page and what interests them.
Link tracking enables you to identify better ways to drive more traffic and conversions.
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5. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate refers to the number of social media users who click on a specific link. While conversion doesn’t happen over social media channels per se, the clicks from Facebook, Instagram,. Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Pinterest, SnapChat or TikTok to your landing page, order page, eCommerce store, and more are powerful indicators of how exciting and relevant your content is to the audience.
CTR is also a great indicator of how well different content (videos, animation, case studies, or infographics) performs for your brand on social media.
Here’s how to calculate click-through rate:
Total number of clicks per post/ Total number of impressions X 100 = CTR percentage
6. Cost-Per-Lead (CPL)
Cost-per-lead is a vital element of evaluating the financial aspect of your social media lead generation efforts. It helps you understand the actual cost of acquiring leads from social channels.
CPL shows you what campaigns and channels provide the higher ROI, thus allowing you to optimize your budget for more success.
You can calculate CPL by dividing the total campaign cost by the number of leads generated. For more specific insights, you can even calculate CPL per campaign and channel.
At Growth Hackers, we worked with a fintech lead gen campaign where the client was scaling spend blindly, and after implementing CPL tracking by campaign and channel, they cut wasted ad spend while increasing qualified leads by 26%.
7. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
Customer lifetime value projects the revenue a single customer will generate throughout their lifetime for your business. It’s a crucial lead metric to measure for better resource allocation, ROI analysis, customer retention, and more.
While various facets affect CLTV, including marketing, customer service operations, and upselling, here are a few elements you must take into account when calculating it:
- The number of purchases customers make in a year
- The average purchase size of each customer
- The average profit margins for determining yearly profit per customer.
A higher CLTV will show that your social media lead-generation efforts are generating higher-value customers. At Growth Hackers, we worked with an online education platform where social media brought in low-value one-time buyers, and after refining their retention and upsell strategy, CLTV increased by 38% as customers enrolled in multiple courses over time.
Integrate Social Media with Website Analytics | 2 Main Ways
When done right, your social media lead generation efforts will lead to a conversion page, ideally your website or eCommerce store. Integrating social media with your website marketing analytics can, therefore, help you trace the journey of leads from social posts or add them to your site. This will involve monitoring the traffic flow from different social channels to your sites and analyzing the behavior of this traffic.
Use UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters for all your lead generation-focused social media URLs that direct traffic to the site and leverage Google’s Campaign URL Builder to create the UTM-tagged URLs for tracking in Google Analytics.
Analyzing this will allow you to make better decisions and add crucial website features for lead generation, like site Chatbots, clear CTAs, click-to-text buttons, etc… thus boosting conversions. At Growth Hackers, we implemented full UTM-based attribution for a manufacturing client’s social campaigns and website funnel, increasing attributed conversions while improving cross-channel decision-making accuracy.
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1. Opportunity
After analyzing the crucial metrics in the engagement stage, it’s time to tap into the opportunity to acquire fresh and relevant leads… revamp your social media lead generation strategies for good.
The opportunity metrics are measured through questions like:
- After click-through, where did the lead go on your website?
- Did they opt to receive additional informational and promotional content by subscribing to your newsletter or downloading materials?
- Where did they drop off?
You also want to analyze the length of time spent on each page of their path to your site (paid social media ad, homepage, etc). This will help you identify the drop-off points. For example, if a huge portion is leaving after the landing page, it’s signaling that you need to create a more compelling and converting landing page.
The goal of this stage is to zero down on leads who spend the most amount, visit the most pages, and fill out lead magnets and conversion forms. It’s here where your strongest opportunities lie.
2. Conversion
The final metric you want to track and analyze is conversion; specifically, the lead-to-customer conversion rate. Lead-to-customer conversion rate is the measure of the percentage of leads that ultimately become your customers.
The definition of conversion can be different for your business or a specific campaign. For some, it can be as simple as filling out a form. For others, it can be opting for SaaS Demos or trials. No matter what, the conversion metric provides invaluable insights into the effectiveness of your lead nurturing and sales process.
To track the lead-to-customer conversion rate, you have to integrate your social media lead generation and customer relationship management (CRM) system. Through this, you can follow the customer journey from the initial lead capture through social media posts or ads to the final conversion.
Tracking the conversion rate allows you to easily identify the bottleneck in the funnel, optimizing your efforts and increasing your chances of transforming leads into customers.
Aligning your social media marketing and sales team will ensure a seamless transition between leads and customers. Lead scoring and qualification processes help to prioritize leads with the highest CLTV potential. Before working with Growth Hackers, a B2B brand generated leads from social media but had no visibility into what became customers, but after implementing CRM integration (HubSpot in that case), lead scoring, and personalized outreach, they increased conversion rates by 29% and significantly improved sales efficiency.
It is important to use personalized communication for each lead stage. Tools like LinkedIn message automation can be leveraged to reach the right audience at the right time. Using data collected from the engagement metrics and past social media interactions, you can tailor each conversation for conversion.
Make the Right Move | Set Goals, Test, and Measure
Every business is unique, and so are its audiences, goals, and challenges. Analyzing the above-mentioned social media lead generation metrics is important to track, measure, and improve your success rate. But it should not stop there.
Whether your overall goal is to increase sales or resume submissions, it is important to understand your ideal user’s origins and motivation, measuring every action that can potentially lead them to you. Experiment with your social media lead generation messaging, inducing voice, tone, offers, photos, timing, and more. Track everything, make adjustments, and your leads will start rolling in.
Growth Hackers offers top-notch lead generation services helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners fuel their social media lead generation approach, increase their productivity, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales.
We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
