If you’ve already watched our Social Media Fast Start series…

…you’ll remember how I walked you through the steps of following and engaging with LinkedIn and Facebook Groups. I also showed you how to start building an active online community by participating in other people’s blogs, listening on Twitter, etc.

If you haven’t already watched the series, you should sign up here.

Today I’m going to show you exactly how all of that stuff pays off. Here’s what it looks like:

Campaign Tracking Report from our Free Marketing Method presentation on ReadyTalk

You are looking at a chart that tracks registrations to our upcoming Free Marketing Method presentation. To promote the event I used ReadyTalk’s “unique url” feature. This allows me to tell where our visitors are coming from, and how well they are converting (actually registering for the event). Here are some of the specific statistics:

• So far we’ve had 313 people visit the registration page. 32 of them have registered for the event. That’s a conversion rate of just over 10% – not bad though I’ll certainly be working on improving that ratio by using some of the Site Optimization and Conversion techniques we teach in our Core Program.
• The best results are coming from the announcements we posted on LinkedIn – that’s right, the exact groups we showed you how to join in the Social Media Fast Start presentation. See how it comes together? Specifically, we’ve had 83 visits from LinkedIn, and 11 of those visitors have registered for the course. This accounts for 34% of our registrations (so far).
• The next best results are coming from our direct list (which is reported as “default”) and our partner MassChallenge, who generously announced the event to their email list. Both are generating 22% of our registrations.
• 34% (LinkedIn) plus 22% (from our own list) plus 22% (from the MassChallenge list) = 78% of our registrations from the top three sources.
• All other sources combined account for only 22%.

Learnings and Surprises

So what does this tell us? I can infer a few important things:

1. LinkedIn is a great resource, and I need to continue engaging with people there. In fact, I will increase my level of engagement by responding to more discussions and starting more conversations of my own.

2. Honestly, our internal list isn’t performing as well as it could – or should. But I think I know why. Fearing “information overload” I restrict the amount of information we send out to the people on our email list. That’s a legitimate concern, but it’s also true that it takes time and consistency to build relationships – and people buy based on relationships. So I’ll start connecting with our subscribers more regularly.

3. Facebook isn’t performing as well as you might have imagined it would. Again, we might be facing an issue of consistency here. Free Marketing Made Easy has a Facebook Page, and although we are active on it, Facebook recently changed their parameters so that we can no longer send out “member updates.” In other words, if you “like” our page, you have to come over and look at it in order to know about our event listing. I’m considering switching over to a Facebook Group because of this, in order to gain the advantage of push notifications. That will be a subject for another post.

In fact, it’s also a good subject to post on LinkedIn, right?

Conclusion

My final point is that you should be considering web conferences. There are at least two reasons why:

1. To generate leads
2. To measure return on investment from your advertising – and see what works best.

As we explain in our Core Program, ReadyTalk’s platform allows us to automatically:

• confirm registrations
• attach our free ebook as a registration gift
• send reminders
• leverage Social Media
• even follow up (there’s one preset message for people who actually attend the event, and another for people who registered but missed the live session)

No matter what your business does, we could probably find a good way for you to deliver your message through this mechanism. If you need help thinking up ideas, contact me.