5 Reasons Why You Should Start Using Oktopost for Your B2B Social Media Management

As we all know, many B2B marketers use social media as an essential part of their marketing strategy. It’s a time consuming task that requires a bit of skill and know-how, since every social media platform requires a different approach depending on character counts, the style and tone of the platform, the topic of the post, the audience, and whether or not they are a B2B company or B2C, etc. To accommodate for that, marketers will use tools called social media management platforms. These platforms make it easy to listen, engage, curate content, and boost their social reach on multiple social media platforms from a single place. Some of them even help create very ‘pretty’ reports. But there is one major problem with a number of these platforms: They are not built for B2B marketers. That is, most of them, with the exception of one – Oktopost.

In this article, I’ll share with you why Oktopost is the best social media management platform for data driven B2B marketers and how it goes about blowing other platforms, like SproutSocial, Hootsuite, Sendible and Buffer, out of the water.

#1: Be able to track real KPI’s from your social media posts: Leads, not Likes

See exactly which social media post converted a specific lead.

Yes, it’s nice to know what geolocation your likes are coming from, and to see that the number of followers are increasing, but what’s the use of such information if very few of them are actually converting? That’s a rhetorical question, but just in case, the answer is little to none.

Now you can assign conversions, name, email, social profiles and all to the social media activities of a specific lead who clicked on a social link up to 3 months before the conversion took place!

#2: You don’t need to depend on Google Analytics for limited and misleading data

Details on lead capture

Before you go touting that you can use Google Analytics to see whether your conversions are coming from social, I’ve got some news for you: There are a few, but very significant problems with Google Analytics:

• Google Analytics cannot tell you who converted and from what post. In other words, any conversions that came from a social link remain anonymous, and unless you go through the hassle of creating a unique URL for every post that you make, you will also not know which text promoted the link successfully. Many times, marketers will share the same link multiple times but each time, there is a variation of the text to promote it. Google won’t tell you which specific text was the one that did the job. Come to think of it, it also won’t tell you at what time a specific conversion happened. Think of how powerful it would be for a marketer to know that ‘Person A’ converted from a social post that had to do with marketing ROI on a certain Saturday at 9am, while ‘Person B’ converted from a social post about a webinar on a certain Monday at 5pm.
• Google Analytics can only show you conversions from social links that go straight into your website and then convert on the spot. But (a) sometimes people don’t convert after the first social link, and (b)mostmarketers curate content that points to other websites. Ultimately, valuable data gets lost and you won’t know if your social media posts help bring a valuable portion of your prospects!First, let’s elaborateonproblem (a): Many times people bounce around the net for hours, days, weeks, or even months before they actually convert. In addition, it’s very common for people to do internet research on your product before they actually come back and become a lead. So if, for example, you wrote a post on LinkedIn that got clicked on for the first time in January by ‘Person A’, but then they surfed the web for months before they made the decision to do a Google search for your website in March and convert, Google Analytics will only show that they converted from an organic search and not from the first original social click that they made 3 months ago.However, if you made that same LinkedIn post with Oktopost, that same person would get tagged so that when they do convert, even 3 months later, you will see all of your social links they clicked on before and after they converted, along with the details of every post:
  • the first social click
  • the topic campaigns that the social links were from
  • from whose social profile it came from (because Oktopost allows multiple users)
  • the date and time that they opened each post
  • the type of device they opened it with (i.e., desktop or mobile)

Second, problem (b): Inbound marketers know that it’s good practice to not always push content that solely focuses on their company on social media, for example sharing links to other websites when their company is mentioned. So if ‘Company X’ proudly tweets a link that points to a blog post in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the link’s pathway could look something like this:

1. Company X tweets from a social media management platform → WSJ blog that mentions Company X → 3 months of internet surfing → Company X’s website → Convert
2. Company X tweets from a social media management platform → WSJ blog that mentions Company X → Click on link in WSJ that points directly to Company X’s website → Convert
3. Company X tweets from the Oktopost social media management platform → WSJ blog that mentions Company X → 3 months of internet surfing → Company X’s website → Convert

What happens here when you look at Google Analytics? In scenario 1 and 2, GA will not show Company X that their lead actually came from Company X’s tweet. Whereas, in scenario #3, Oktopost will show Company X that this person converted thanks to the marketing team using social media.

Even if you were to create a unique URL for curated content, which means you went through all the trouble of knowing how to do it, shortening it, and then posting it in social media directly on the social media platform or the social media management platform, the most you could know is the number of times the social link was clicked on.

But with Oktopost, we take care of all that hassle and solve the problem of lost data by doing the following:

• automatically creating a unique URL for a specific campaign
• automatically shortening the link
• the link shared does not have to go straight into your website in order to know if a lead came in from any of your social links shared

This is the first time marketers can actually assign social conversions to social activities, giving them better visibility in regard to any kind of social interaction.

#3 Lead nurture and lead score your prospects better with our deep integration with Marketing Automation and CRM tools

If you’re a B2B marketer who is working with premium marketing automation tools and CRM systems, then you’ll be happy to know that Oktopost enhances the data in these platforms for better lead nurturing and lead scoring. In other words, you can identify important details of data on your leads at all of the various stages of the marketing and sales funnel and then score and nurture them accordingly.

When you know your prospects better, you can convert them and get them to become your evangelists easier. You can do this by creating far better targeted emails, newsletters, webinars, whitepapers, demos and so on. Oktopost currently makes deep integration possible with the following platforms:

• Marketo
• Eloqua
• Act-On
• Salesforce

Online tools that integrate with Oktopost (Source: Oktopost)

#4: Finally, marketers can know what their Social ROI is

This is revolutionary. Now you can finally measure and put a real monetary value on inbound leads that come from your social media posts! Want to prove the ROI of your social media marketing efforts? Consider it done. Just assign the value of the social lead according to how they converted (i.e., download, sign up, white paper, etc.) and Oktopost will automatically calculate all of your conversions that come from your social media marketing efforts.

Only with Oktopost can you track your social conversions and know the real ROI of your social media marketing efforts

#5: The Advocacy Board: Amplify your social media content to the max

Many businesses post the content they create to their own social media channels and just leave it there, hoping that others will share it and make it ‘viral’. But there is no easier way to get your messaging out to a targeted audience than to have other people spreading the word about you, for you. Not only does it bring you the value of social proof, but you expand your relevant network!

These people, are your most valuable assets in promoting content. These newfound evangelists can be comprised of your employees, your peers, your distributors, friendly companies who share the same vertical, and so on. For B2B companies, that’s a lot of people, and a whole lot of reach.

Oktopost has designed a way to tap into this resource and connect it directly to our social media management platform. It’s called our Advocacy Board. The Advocacy Board is a virtual board where your company’s skilled marketers pin pre-approved social media posts for your advocates to easily click to share on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ at the same time, allowing you to track the leads you get from their shares! The benefits, in a nutshell:

• Social proof. When set other people up to talk about you, you are wisely leveraging your social influence. The truth is, when it comes to B2B-related content on social media, content published by brands isn’t nearly as valuable as content published by peers and individuals. People tend to trust other people, more than they trust brands. DemandGen’s 2014 B2B Content Preferences survey showed that almost all respondents (97%) gave more credence to content that includes peer reviews and user-generated content.
• Amplify your leads into the funnel exponentially.  You can add an unlimited amount of people to broadcast your message.
• Saves valuable time, and requires no marketing skills. Quite often your evangelists are not social media savvy, nor do they have the time to create a clever post for you. With Oktopost, your advocates can widely expand your reach within a highly relevant network of prospects within seconds.
• It’s so easy. All they have to do is go to one place and click “Share Now” or “Share Later.” They have the option to edit the text and personalize it instantly, if they want to, as well. In addition, they don’t have to hunt for your posts that got lost in their social media feed, and you don’t have to constantly bug them via email to share important posts.
• Zero overhead. You don’t need a separate platform to manage and maintain the social content along with a social advocacy board.
• All of the benefits of trackability of social inbound leads available in Oktopost are also automatically available with the Advocacy Board’s data.
• Measure the ROI of your advocacy program. Again, all of this is thanks to the fact that every action takes place on the same data sharing infrastructure.

Pre-approved social media posts for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn created by your marketing team and pinned to your Advocacy Board so that your advocates can click to share for you.

Conclusion

Hootsuite and Buffer are great platforms, but if you’re a B2B marketer, you need something more powerful and effective. Oktopost is the one and only  one-stop-shop for all of your social media management needs, while:

• Having the capability to track real KPI’s from your social media posts: Leads, not Likes

• No longer get limited and misleading social stats from Google Analytics

• Lead nurture and lead score your prospects better with our deep integration with Marketing Automation and CRM tools (NOBODY ELSE DOES THIS) 😉

• Finally, marketers can know what their monetary Social ROI is.

• Using the Advocacy Board to amplify your social media content to the max with your brand ambassadors.

#6 You have to see it to believe it. Grab a demo now.

If you’d like to find out more about Oktopost’s features or want to see it in action, you can sign up for a demo today.