A lot of clients tell me they don’t understand what social media means for their business. They don’t understand how it can increase their brand presence or how it can be translated into sales.

In response, I wanted to showcase some facts about what we are doing here at Red Design Group with our social media programme and see if this shapes some thinking. Our website and social media programme drives both new business leads and builds brand awareness. We use Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and YouTube as our primarily social channels.

Social isn’t just a 1 to 1 relationship it’s a 1 to many.
As of today, Red Design Group’s Facebook Fan Page has, 112 Facebook Fans, which with their friends gives us an immediate reach of 44,443 people. That means when we post to our page, and our fans see that content our true reach has the potential to be 39 times greater than our immediate relationship with any individual fan.

You don’t need a lot of content to have a big impact.
Our Social analytics tells us that the total number of times our content has been seen in the last 90 days across Facebook and Twitter, is 34,100 times. That’s a lot of impressions, eyeballs and potential new clients, potential employees or future business partners. Considering we only have a few dozen posts, 112 Facebook Fans, and a couple of dozen twitter followers, that is a lot of extra reach. These figures also don’t take into account any shared content on Pinterest, LinkedIn or YouTube, which would push these figures up further.

When I compare this to our website traffic our total page views is 25,639 across our entire site from 6,892 visits. So our social media programme based on impressions is outpacing our website by 24.8%.

Google analytics tells me that the number of users that viewed our website that came from a social media source, was 439. This is equivalent to 6% of our total website traffic.

So what are these figures telling me?
The number of leads we are directly receiving from our website, via our social media presence is low, but the amount of activity on social media is high. This tells me that our audience is consuming our content on social media and not engaging directly with our website. This means we need to continue to feed more content to our ever expanding social audience, and focus on generating leads directly from our social media programme and not rely on website as the only lead generation opportunity for us.

Our next steps
We are in the process of building a new website, which enables us to share and track our content directly from the site and publish out to the social web at the click of a button. Stay tuned this will launch next month! For customer service and lead generation we are already providing social customer service directly on Facebook and twitter to answer enquiries. Finally, I am looking at integrating an enquiry form into Facebook. This will help us out when we are not available to answer questions, (we all have to sleep at some point).

Conclusion
The main conclusion I can see from these figures is that people are engaging with our brand in the social web and not leaving those sites to come to our website. Simply put if we want to engage with your customers via social media than you need to take our brand to them and not expect them to come to us.