LeadFWD is pleased to announce the release of Social Connect 2.0. The crux of digital marketing incorporates a wealth of mediums, and the social media space has become an integral part of modern marketing strategies. Social Media allows the ability to connect information to people in ways absent with standard email marketing. Most companies garner some form of social media presence but the space is fairly saturated. Social Media floods with information making it extremely important to enter the space with a strategy and the tools necessary to analyze your strategies effectiveness.

Lack of Organization and Management

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are their own separate applications, and as such cannot run natively together. Managing multiple social profiles within different browser tabs can be summed up in one word, inefficient. Disorganization is a marketers worst nightmare. Marketing is methodical, and your marketing platform should provide for an intricate but flexible interface.

With Social Connect 2.0, manage all your Social Media profiles from one complete interface to increase efficiency and maximize your marketing efforts. You can post to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn - to multiple profiles with a single post action. We simplify the demands of a Marketing Manager by bringing more inbound/outbound marketing management tasks under the umbrella of one platform.

Connecting Your Strategy

The key word here is cohesion. A successful digital marketing strategy is one that is shaped around a healthy database. But there is often a disconnect between your social following and your marketing database. How efficient can your social marketing be when it runs independent of your other digital marketing vehicles?

Social Connect 2.0 will bridge that gap. When a Social Manager recognizes a social user that corresponds to a Target/Lead in their Marketing Database, they can quickly link that Social Profile to the Target/Lead record. This is social media marketing working as a two way street. This approach creates uniformity between Marketing Automation data and Social Intelligence. In a traditional model, social marketing is managed by a 3rd party tool (which MA platform) or directly through a social network.

Analytics That Matter

Native Social Media apps are fantastic for getting your information into the public space, but lack the interface, analytics and insight found within Social Connect 2.0. How do you know what’s working? Social Marketing can be invaluable for lead generation, lead nurturing, spreading brand awareness and customer support. But, without analytics or data tracking how can you tell what’s working? You probably can’t. When you bring your Social Marketing program into the fold with your marketing platform, you gain access to a bounty of data and analytics that can measure the effectiveness of your social marketing - including ROI.

While 3rd party apps will provide you a great deal of insight into your social audience, demographic and performance - it stops short of completing the loop to include sales opportunities and revenue. Knowing the influence your social marketing is having on the bottom line is critical.

Listening To Your Leads

A successful marketing strategy starts with understanding your leads behavior. With Social Streams you can follow all of your published posts, comments, mentions, retweets, new followers and likes - all from a single view. This is typically referred to as social monitoring. Users can also filter their streams by keywords or specific activities. This is helpful if you want to quickly parse what your followers are saying by keyword or hashtag. For example, you could create a custom stream that segments out social commentary by the hashtag #marketingautomation - as a mechanism to identify network followers that are engaging with your industry.

Controlling the Dial

Since Social Connect 2.0 provides full engagement functionality (comments, retweets, reply, etc.), administrators are able to grant LeadFWD users permission access to handle a range of social responsibilities. Meaning, an admin could grant John Doe access to reply to incoming social commentary via the Social Stream, but not to compose new outbound posts. Or, John Doe could be configured to compose new posts but only an admin could approve them for scheduling/publishing. The hidden benefit is that a company will not have to share their social credentials with their employees in order for them to gain access to manage a social profile. Instead, they connect their LeadFWD account to their Social Profile and then grant users a range of access based on their role, using LeadFWD user permissions.

Additional Resources

Benefits of Social Marketing