The most effective marketers focus on creating on-brand content that both reaches their audience and has a measurable impact. Fortunately, measuring your impact doesn’t have to be complicated. And tracking your social media marketing results helps you show the value of social media as a revenue-generating channel.

In this article, we’ll cover:

  • Proven strategies to connect social media metrics to business outcomes
  • How to amplify your reach by leveraging your ecosystem
  • Real-world examples of how measuring social media marketing results and using advocacy campaigns have a positive impact on B2B social media

For more on measuring and amplifying your social media impact, watch our free webinar on demand: From Metrics to Buy-In: Proving B2B Social Media Success to Stakeholders.

Driving Business Impact With B2B Social Media

Social media is not created equally for B2B and B2C. While B2C social content is often focused on boosting brand visibility, customer service, and encouraging quick purchases, B2B has more nuance.

B2B marketers focus on high-value content for targeted audiences that fit their ideal customer profile (ICP). The sales process is much longer than a B2C brand, and B2B companies have to prove their value to prospects all throughout the buyer’s journey.

“As B2B marketers, we want to see conversions, video views, webinar sign-ups, free trials. We want to see all the early signs of engagement from prospects.” (Emeric Ernoult, CEO and co-founder of Agorapulse)

So, how can B2B marketers effectively use social media to drive business impact from those early signs of engagement to conversion?

Agorapulse B2B Social Media Survey Results

A survey of 300 B2B social media marketers, conducted by Agorapulse, revealed two significant findings about B2B social media.

  1. Engagement and reach is never going to be enough in the B2B space. Social media marketers need to be able to prove results and measure impact. (Hello, ROI-driven content strategy.)
  2. It’s hard to win alone. When you’re a social media manager or a community manager for a B2B brand, making a business impact through social media is a team effort. Success means getting help from your ecosystem—whether that’s influencers, ambassadors, or employees.

Let’s dig into how focusing on these two findings can help you amp up engagement, drive more leads, and measure social media marketing results like a pro.

How to Start Tracking Your Social Media Marketing Results

If you’re not sure where to start with measuring your impact on social media, you’re not alone.

When an Agorapulse study asked 300 marketers how important it is to measure the business impact of social media, 98% said that it’s somewhat or extremely important.

Social media survey question: How important is it to measure the business impact of?

Result of Agorapulse survey of 300 B2B marketers

In a follow-up question, survey respondents were asked if they’re currently measuring revenue or leads generated from social media and only 35% responded that they were.

Social media survey question: Are you measuring revenue or leads generated from social media?

Result of Agorapulse survey of 300 B2B marketers

Marketing is often looked at as a cost center, not a profit center. With proper tracking, you can shift that thinking and prove the impact you’re having on revenue.

“When I was discussing with C-levels and company leaders, a lot of them were looking at social media as a necessary evil. This is something that I wanted to rethink and change.”(Emeric Ernoult, CEO and co-founder of Agorapulse)

Using UTMs For Measuring ROI

A review of over 10 million posts by Agorapulse customers showed 32% (3,393,506) had a link in them, but only 1.8% (64,884) of them were being tracked. That’s 98.2% of links in social posts going untracked. The impact of these posts remains a mystery.

Luckily, there’s an easy fix for marketers wanting to track their links.

For organic social, nothing beats UTMs for measuring impact. UTM parameters tell Google Analytics where your traffic is coming from. They tell you what campaign the traffic is associated with, the source (i.e., which social network), and what the medium is (e.g., Facebook comment, a specific post, or direct message response).

The simple action of adding UTMs to your links in all of your posts, comments, and DMs ensures that you can attribute website visits, conversions, and ultimately, revenue generated.

To see this at work, let’s take a closer look at three businesses using tracking to show how their social media marketing is having a positive effect on their bottom line.

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3 Examples of Businesses Proving Their Social Media ROI

1.  Brayola

Brayola is an online lingerie retailer. Their Head of Customer Experience, Fiona Abrams, has seen firsthand how vital it is to track the results of her social media initiatives.

Brayola was running a lot of ads on Meta. Fiona noticed they were getting a ton of questions on those ads about products, payment methods, shipping options, and other customer service-related questions. To provide a positive customer experience, she wanted to respond to all those questions directly in the comments. She quickly realized that she couldn’t do it alone.

To help her respond to the comments, she hired two virtual assistants. Of course, there was a cost associated with this, so she turned to UTMs when asked to justify the cost to her boss. To track the impact of these comment responses, the VAs started adding links with UTMs in the comment responses to track the traffic coming from this source.

After a month of having this attribution, she was able to track the revenue being generated from the responses in the comments. Despite the £2000 ($2,085) budget for the VAs, she was able to show that their dedication to answering questions in the comments generated £4000 ($4,170) in revenue.

Tracking ROI with Agorapulse

When Fiona shared her success story with Agorapulse, she brought up a good question. Why is there automatic tracking for email and paid advertising campaigns, but social media tracking was such a manual process?

We took her feedback and introduced our ROI feature. This feature helps marketers get actionable insights while tracking, reporting, and showcasing their social media impact—all without having to be a Google Analytics expert.

  • Create and add UTMs directly from Agorapulse for easy and consistent performance tracking. Links are also automatically shortened.
  • Connect your Google Analytics account to your Agorapulse dashboard for a complete snapshot of your social media ROI.
  • Get presentation-ready reports to easily share with stakeholders.

See Agorapulse’s social media ROI tracking in action with this quick overview:

Equipped with concrete data, you can do as Fiona did and justify your social media spend, double down on what’s working, and prove the effectiveness of social media as a revenue-generating channel.

“You’re never going to measure everything, but if you can measure something that pays the salary of the social media manager, everything else is a cherry on top.”(Emeric Ernoult, CEO and co-founder of Agorapulse)

Start measuring your social media marketing results now with a free trial of Agorapulse.

2. Justin Welsh

As a LinkedIn influencer, Justin posts a lot of content with high engagement, but he wanted more concrete data on the impact of his efforts. Using Agorapulse, he started tracking the links in his posts. This gave him a clear picture in Google Analytics of the types of content that performed well and specific posts that led to purchases, newsletter subscribers, and website visitors.

Knowing what’s driving revenue and what resonates with your audience can help you make more informed decisions about where to focus your efforts and your time.

3. Saint-Gobain

A French company that produces construction materials, Saint-Gobain’s social media strategy focuses on how-to videos on YouTube to showcase their products.

In the YouTube descriptions, they include links to all of the products featured in the video with UTMs for each. With this tracking, in Google Analytics, they can track not only website visits, but also get more granular conversion data. This helps to quantify their YouTube strategy by seeing how much revenue this channel is driving.

For even more examples of B2B businesses tracking their ROI on social media, watch our free webinar on demand: From Metrics to Buy-In: Proving B2B Social Media Success to Stakeholders.

Amplify Your B2B Social Media Impact with Advocacy Campaigns

On to the second finding of the survey—social media marketers who leverage their ecosystem make a bigger impact and see more measurable success than those who go at it alone. Advocacy campaigns help you amplify your marketing efforts by leveraging influencers, partners, and employees.

How much of a difference does advocacy make? In a review of over 1000 posts from 10 Agorapulse customers, the average engagement of a post with an advocacy campaign behind it was 550% more than those without any advocacy efforts. Average impressions were equally impressive at 200% more while conversions were 400% higher with advocacy efforts.

3 B2B Companies Seeing Results Through Advocacy Campaigns

Real-life examples back up this finding. Here are 3 B2B companies who have seen drastic improvements in their social media results thanks to advocacy campaigns.

1. Rathbones Group

An investment management company in the UK, Rathbones used their 42 advocates to supercharge their social media efforts.

In posts without advocacy campaigns, their average engagements were around 718 impressions and 7 clicks. With an advocacy campaign, their impressions jumped to 2739 with 210 clicks.

Results: 3x impressions and 20x clicks

Results of Rathbones Group's advocacy campaign

Advocacy campaign results

2. Rumpke Waste & Recycling

Even with only 31 advocates, this US waste and recycling company saw a huge impact on their reach and engagement using advocacy.

Without an advocacy campaign behind it, one of their posts received 452 impressions and 16 clicks. When they posted content with the help of an advocacy campaign, they saw numbers like 4690 impressions and 132 clicks.

Results: 10x impressions, 10x clicks

Results of Rumpke's advocacy campaign

Advocacy campaign results

3. CereCore

This healthcare IT services company proved that you don’t have to look far for advocates. They have a network of 65 employee advocates that they leverage for their advocacy efforts.

We looked at 35 posts in a 30-day period, comparing those with an advocacy campaign behind them and those without. Without advocacy, their posts received an average of 557 impressions and 8 clicks. With advocacy campaigns, their posts averaged 1562 impressions and 83 clicks.

Results: 180% more impressions, 894% more clicks

Results of advocacy campaign efforts for CereCore

Advocacy campaign results for CereCore

These results show that there’s huge potential to amplify your social media reach by using your network. Leverage tools that simplify running advocacy campaigns and remember that you don’t need a huge network to make an impact.

Advocacy by Agorapulse

Agorapulse’s advocacy tool helps you harness the power of your advocates to amplify your message on social media.

  • Segment your audiences to easily define the campaigns that work best for them.
  • Provide content options that keep your messaging consistent and on-brand, making it easy for your advocates to share content.
  • Track and measure campaign results so you can spend time on what’s performing best. Discover your top advocates, top performing channels and networks, and more.

Advocacy can help with acquiring qualified leads, promoting events, and recruiting new employees. By using advocates to talk directly to their network, you’ll harness the power of authentic engagement and amplified reach to boost your social media performance.

Combine Advocacy and ROI Tracking to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Results

While likes, shares, and views are important, quantifying your social media impact will make your efforts really shine. Not only will it help you make data-driven decisions, you’ll prove the value of your social media strategy to stakeholders. Combine this with advocacy campaigns to really get your message out there and supercharge your social media impact.

For more insights on advocacy and measuring ROI, watch our free webinar on demand: From Metrics to Buy-In: Proving B2B Social Media Success to Stakeholders.

How to Measure and Amplify Your B2B Social Media Marketing Results