Tracking B2B Social Media Requires Looking at the Whole Purchase Funnel

TagMan is a tag management company that provides marketers and advertisers with the tools to track online ad campaigns. CEO Paul Cook spoke with eMarketer’s Kimberly Maul about the company’s social media outreach in the B2B space, as well as how a brand that offers tracking tools measures its own social media outreach.

eMarketer: How does TagMan use social media?

Paul Cook: We use social in a number of ways. First of all, we’ve set up LinkedIn groups and have 600 or so members. That’s been great to get the conversation going and allows us to communicate with people who are interested in TagMan or tag management in general on an ongoing basis.

We also have several Twitter accounts. One is straight news: about us, about the industry, anything we think is relevant. That often points toward our blog, which we see as outreach from a social media strategy—another way to, basically, engage in the conversation.

“We see [our blog] as outreach from a social media strategy—another way to, basically, engage in the conversation.”

The final area that we use social for is on the recruiting side, and we decided that our Facebook strategy would be showing the real face of the company. It’s an open page that shows what people in the company are doing. People are encouraged to take photos and generally embarrass each other within the confines of decent taste. If a potential recruit is investigating the company, then they can see it’s a real place with real people in a good environment, and there’s a good self-respect to it.

eMarketer: Do you think LinkedIn is the best social network for B2B companies to be on right now?

Cook: Certainly, it’s where people are. For me, it’s very useful from a prospecting point of view and it’s always been used a lot from a recruitment standpoint. Then, from a paid marketing perspective, you get a lot of detail about job function and about the companies where people are working. You can target by location, as well down to city level. It is a very data-rich environment to market within. We have our group and we’re thinking about doing more with LinkedIn.

eMarketer: What are the differences between B2B social media outreach and B2C social media outreach?

Cook: You have to interact more on social when you’re a B2B company. People expect more personalized service because you’re talking about completely different scale. In B2B, if there’s a conversation going on about you and you don’t engage in it constructively, then that’s going to be seen as a negative. People expect you to be active in social and for you to respond. And ultimately, if you don’t do a great job, that is going to spread within your business community.

“In B2B, if there’s a conversation going on about you and you don’t engage in it constructively, then that’s going to be seen as a negative.”

When you’re a B2C company, social has to be run more in a silo. Because of the scale, you’re going to end up with a team that’s running a social media strategy and their ultimate goal is to get people to engage on social media in a way that’s trackable.

eMarketer: How do you measure TagMan’s social media outreach?

Cook: Because people will often engage with you when they’re still investigating a topic rather than being close to actually purchasing, it’s hard to connect straight clickthroughs back to social. You have to look back through the path to conversion. Google added conversion funnels to its products recently, so if you can’t afford a dedicated attribution solution then there are free tools coming out. That certainly can give you better metrics if you’re looking for a direct response.

In terms of the metrics that we look at, for every lead that we get through the website, social will be reported on, whether or not that was part of the path to conversion. We want to see numbers of Twitter followers we’re getting and we’d expect to see some of those people join our LinkedIn group. I would certainly count interaction with the blog as part of social.

When we promote content in any of our social channels, we’re always using a specific URL so we can see where that traffic came from. Social just becomes early stage in your buying cycle or funnel.

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