Two brand-new studies by HubSpot and Edison Research provide fresh insights on these important questions. Consider these five findings as you enhance your social media and blogging strategies.

#1: More frequent blog posts bring greater traffic and leads

C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley like to say that starting a blog is like having a baby. You can’t put it back and you have to keep feeding it. The question is how often do you need to feed your blog to get real results?

HubSpot found in their 2011 State of Inbound Marketing report that a vast majority of bloggers post once per week, with a significant 29% only posting monthly or less.

No matter how nutritious the food is, no doctor would recommend feeding a baby weekly or less. Mike Stelzner acknowledges that most content only has a shelf life of around 72 hours. Read about this in his new book Launch.

As it turns out, businesses seeing significant growth have also discovered they need to feed their blogs more frequently.

There’s a strong correlation between how frequently a blog posts and the amount of traffic generated. In fact, businesses that post daily will generate 5 times more traffic than those that post weekly or less.

The likelihood of acquiring a customer through your blog increases significantly the more frequently you post. Note that posting multiple times per day gets 15% greater results than just posting daily. Of course, you need to understand your audience’s appetite for content before you start posting multiple times per day.

While getting one customer through your blog is great, it will be far better when you start seeing consistent leads. HubSpot found blogs that post daily generate 4 times more leads than those that post weekly or less.

#2: A steady library of blog posts grew leads and traffic better

Over time, a well-fed blog will outperform other blogs. This is evidenced by the impact of blog size on traffic and lead generation. (Note: By blog size, I don’t mean the size of the company, but the number of blog posts accumulated over time.)

HubSpot found that blogs that have accumulated at least 51 posts see 53% more traffic than blogs with 20 to 50 posts. Additionally, blogs with more than 100 posts see 3 times the traffic, while those with over 200 posts see nearly 4.5 times the results. (Special thanks to Melissa Miller of HubSpot for this exclusive graphic.)

The size of your blog will also affect your monthly leads. Your business will profoundly benefit if you accumulate at least 52 blog posts.

#3: More Twitter followers = more leads

As Elijah Young reminded us last month, all Twitter followers aren’t created equal. So, if you have 1,000 spam accounts following you, there won’t be much measurable benefit to your business. But don’t let that excuse you from trying to grow your following. You may be missing out on some real results!

HubSpot found that businesses with over 1,000 followers saw 6 times more traffic than businesses with 25 or fewer followers.

Additionally, those businesses with over 1,000 followers saw 5 times more leads than those with 1 to 25 followers.

You may have questions about the value of a Twitter strategy, but know that 20 million Americans are on Twitter (half between the ages of 18 and 34, according to Edison Research) and these are the people more likely to influence public opinion about your brand than the other 90% of the population.

#4: Bigger Facebook fanbases mean better results

Edison Research recently found that Facebook is the one social media site that people allow to influence their buying decisions, with 24% listing it as their first choice. Of course, it’s not Facebook itself but the people on Facebook who influence those decisions. That’s why it’s so important to grow a strong and active fanbase.

HubSpot found that the size of your Facebook reach has significant impact on your traffic and leads. For instance, businesses able to grow a fanbase of 501 to 1,000 fans have 3.5 times more traffic than those with 1 to 25 fans. Moreover, businesses with over 1,000 fans had 22 times more traffic.

Additionally, the size of your Facebook fanbase will dramatically impact how many leads you receive. Businesses with 501 to 1,000 fans saw 4 times as many leads as those with 1 to 25 fans and businesses with over 1,000 fans saw 12 times more leads.

#5: Social demographics are growing

Tom Webster of Edison Research recently published a study that gives some fresh insight into how Americans are using social media.

In the Social Media Marketing Industry Report, we made the claim that social media has gone mainstream. Edison’s report proves it. They discovered that 52% of Americans over the age of 12 have at least one social media account and 51% of all Americans are on Facebook.

What’s more significant is that 46 million Americans are on social media sites multiple times per day. These are the influencers and potential clients we all want to reach.

These habitual social networkers tend to be young and female. In fact, 68% of these active networkers are between the ages of 12 and 34. Depending on your product or service, this information could help you better target your customers online.

The last thing to note about frequent social networkers is that they’re nearly twice as likely to be using mobile devices. Make sure to see what it’s like for your customers to engage you on their mobile devices.

Habitual social networkers are also 50% more likely to access social networks via their mobile phones.

Go generate some leads!

In many ways, this research confirms what many experts have been saying, but now you can see the reasons in black and white. If you want to generate leads through social media, try blogging more frequently and growing your reach—all with an understanding of your target audience.

For some great ideas on how to generate leads through social media, refer to Debbie Hemley’s article, 26 Ways to Use Social Media to Generate Leads.

What do you think? I’d love to hear what you think about this research. Leave your comments in the box below.

To fix the lead problem, you need to be able to easily identify where your “system” is breaking. There’s only one place to look for holes in your lead generation efforts: your sales funnel.

I faced this exact challenge and found that it wasn’t my strategies that weren’t delivering—it was the sales process that social media leads were being put through. Once I identified that, I worked on building a better sales process for social media leads.

Do you need a different sales process for your social media campaign?

Here are 4 tips to help you convert your leads.

#1: Identify Traditional Online Leads

Consider the type of leads you have coming in from traditional channels and where they’re coming from. Some traditional online channels that are putting leads through your sales cycle probably include paid search, affiliate advertising, banner advertising and I’m sure there are others.

However, what is similar in all of these? They deliver leads with a call to action that’s for immediate gratification and results in a very “short” sales cycle. They drive the lead to a landing page to “convert now.”

#2: Identify Social Media Leads

Consider the type of leads that are coming from social media outlets. Some fairly common social media channels that are putting leads through your sales cycle probably include Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs and the list goes on.

What’s different? Think about where you’re driving these leads. They’re engaging with content, not landing pages. At the point where they get to a landing page, it’s probably the same landing page that you sent your other leads to.

#3: Differentiating Between Traditional and Social Leads

You can break leads up into three groups: those who responded to direct conversion points, those who responded to indirect conversion points and those who responded to engagement conversion points.

• Direct Conversion Points: People have responded to an ad to buy your product or service. They’ve shown a clear indication that they’re interested in your product or service and are going to buy within a short time. They’ve responded by clicking on a paid search, affiliate or banner advertisement or have responded to an advertisement for an “offer” that they want.

• Indirect Conversion Points: People have downloaded one of your ebooks, attended a non-product–based webinar or subscribed to your newsletter or blog.

Essentially, these people have provided their contact information in response to a “piece of content” that they want.

• Engagement Conversion Points:
  Those who have clicked on your tweets, followed you, become a fan on Facebook, liked your status update or even commented. They’ve interacted with you, but you don’t have their contact information because they haven’t filled out one of your lead forms yet.

Each conversion point is different and should be treated differently. If you think in terms of a sales funnel, these points would stack on top of each other. They could be used to represent an estimated time frame to the point of close or sales conversion.

The time frame will depend on the length of your standard sales cycle. For example, if your sales cycle was 1 to 30 days for your longest direct conversion point lead, you might find that social media leads represent 31 to 60 days for the indirect lead and 61 to 90 days for the engagement lead.

#4: Identify Where You’re Losing Social Media Leads

Where do your social media leads fit into your sales funnel?

If you’re treating the social media lead the same way you’re treating the direct conversion point lead, you’re likely killing the sales before they have time to mature.

The first step to converting social media leads is to understand where they fit in the sales funnel as we’ve discussed here.

The next step is to know what to do differently so you can facilitate their movement through the sales funnel to the sale.

You may find that you don’t have a sales and marketing process that supports this type of lead and if that’s the case, there will be some work to do before your social media sales results will improve.

Do your sales and marketing support your social media leads?

Immediate Action Item

Follow a few of your social media leads to see their path, document what communications they receive and when they convert or when they fall off. You can identify fall-off because they’ll unsubscribe to your emails or stop opening them, or they could even unfollow or un-’like’ you. If you spot-check ten or so leads who have responded to an indirect conversion point, you’ll immediately identify a pattern of where your sales process is killing your sale to give you the data you need for a more in-depth analysis.

To learn more, check out 5 Social Media Mistakes That Hurt Sales, the 3 Ways to Close the Gap Between Social Media and Direct Response and the 3 Ways Twitter Analysis Can Enhance Your Marketing.

How do you track your social media leads? Are they working? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

All photos from Shutterstock.

What’s New This Week?

Facebook Announces Real-Time Analytics for Social Plugins: This gives Facebook page admins “access to real-time analytics to optimize Like buttons across both your site and on Facebook.”  It’s another little upgrade to help you get more out of your Facebook marketing.

"You can use this real-time data to test the impact of button placement on Like Button CTR or identify the Open Graph image that generates the highest Like Story CTR."

HootSuite Launches Super Social Analytics: This is a new collection of customizable reports providing a comprehensive view of social media campaign results to help companies and agencies articulate more clearly the ROI of their efforts.

Check out these new features of this popular tool.

Recent Study Shows LinkedIn Is More Effective for B2B Companies: HubSpot’s 2011 State of Inbound Marketing report shows how B2B and B2C companies are able to acquire customers through four social media channels. And as you can see below, LinkedIn is notably more effective for B2B companies while Facebook is notably more effective for B2C companies.

All of these social media channels bring in leads for both B2B and B2C companies, but some are better than others.

HubSpot recently announced a $32 million investment from Salesforce, Google and Sequoia.

LinkedIn Launches News Feed:  LinkedIn Today “delivers the day’s top news, tailored to you based on what your connections and industry peers are reading and sharing. If you only have five minutes to catch up on news, LinkedIn Today can help you cut through all the clutter, so you can discover the top headlines you need to read to be better informed everyday.”

LinkedIn Today makes it easy for professionals to stay on top of industry news.

Foursquare Adds a New Specials for Businesses: Foursquare’s latest upgrade gives you “a new Specials management system, allowing you to run multiple Specials at any venues you manage; and before, during, and after the campaign you can now see aggregate statistics.”

There are a variety of different Specials to choose from. “Some businesses want Specials that are all about loyalty. For some businesses, they’ll set a Special to unlock at every check-in.  For others, it’s like a coffee shop punch card where you might get something free on your tenth check-in.  For other merchants, it’s about increasing visits – running a frequency Special granting those who check in three times in seven days the ability to unlock their Special.”

Businesses can now choose from a variety of Specials to offer their customers on Foursquare.

ThingLink and SoundCloud Announce Innovative Collaboration to Add Sound to Your Images: Want to add sounds to your website’s images? The process is quick and easy: Set up a free account at ThingLink.com and SoundCloud.com.  Then install a few lines of ThingLink javascript on your website or blog and follow instructions to attach a SoundCloud URL into a tag’s link field on the photo.

Here’s an example from the gallery: as you hover your mouse over the Smashing Pumpkins image below, click the dots to find the audio clip.

Here are a couple of social media tools worth a look.

BTBuckets: “A free personalization and on-site behavioral targeting tool that allows websites to increase engagement and ultimately maximize conversion rate optimization in real time, by segmenting and targeting strategic user groups.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPEv1LPfBw4

DailyFeats: A new “online community that rewards and celebrates doing good. DailyFeats members collect points for doing simple but meaningful feats that benefit the body, mind, home and community. Points can then be redeemed for exciting real-world rewards, including everything from discounts at local businesses to savings from national brands.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=781b_lD-N98

And don’t miss this:

Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Success Summit 2011: Just announced, this online mega-conference will help your business grow with social media.

What social media news caught your interest this week? Please share your comments below.

If you want to hang with the big players—a place where connections are made, leads are generated, and deals go down—then you need to spend more of your time on LinkedIn.

Although other sites have their purpose in the business world and many people utilize multiple social networking sites, LinkedIn is still the number-one place to market your business.  Here are ways to use LinkedIn and get results:

#1: Use LinkedIn Groups & Receive Tons of New Leads Daily

How would you feel if you had a sales funnel that brought in roughly 50 to 100 fresh, highly targeted leads every day? You’d feel pretty confident about putting food on the table next week, right?

Well, creating a LinkedIn group gives you the ability to generate an amazing number of leads from high-end decision makers.

Here are some great groups to closely examine:

• Sports Industry Network
• Inbound Marketers – For marketing professionals
• Social Media Marketing
• Tweeple
• On Startups – A community for entrepreneurs

Here’s how to maximize your LinkedIn group:

1. Add keywords in the description of your group to increase your search rankings on LinkedIn’s search section.
2. Add keywords in the title of the group to be found on Google.
3. Add your company website or blog to the group to drive traffic to your site.
4. Add your blog RSS feed to the group so every new article is automatically posted to the home page of every group member.
5. Send a weekly message that adds value for group members and drives traffic back to your site.
6. Connect people in the group by making introductions to those who could potentially do business with one another.

All of these points will help you generate more leads for your business.  If your sales funnel is set up correctly, you will have more than enough prospects to grow your business.

Make sure you create a group that fills a need for the audience you’re targeting in your business field. This will ensure that every person who joins the group is a qualified lead.

#2: Ask Questions & Build Your Credibility

I’ve asked a number of questions using LinkedIn Answers because it’s a great way to get the answers you need from some of the top experts in the world.

One question I’ve asked was, “How often are you answering questions for others on LinkedIn?” I received about 20 responses, but one answer stood out from the rest.

I had an individual share that he spent about an hour a week answering questions and he was getting three to five new clients a month bringing in roughly $3,000 to $5,000 extra in monthly revenue.  Not bad for answering a few questions, huh?

Here are some tips for answering questions:

First, set up the “Answers Application” on the bottom right-hand side of your home page for the subjects you know best.

This image shows a sampling of the categories you can monitor.

Then, when you see a question pop up that you know the answer to, follow these steps:

1. Research the person who asked the question, and find a way to tie in a personal response with something from their LinkedIn profile.
2. Be as helpful and resourceful as possible when answering the question.  Give tips, website links with additional information, or even recommend someone who is the best expert on that topic.
3. Leave the answer with an open invitation for more communication by asking them to contact you privately if they need any extra help.

All of these tips will help you gain the most out of answering questions, and will help you build powerful relationships that will grow your business.

#3: Create Powerful Events

Hosting an event is a great way to build your business (see events under the ‘More…’ news in the LinkedIn navigation bar).  LinkedIn has an events platform that allows you to target thousands of professionals for free.

I threw close to 20 events around the country last year and I used LinkedIn to promote them, getting approximately 500 paying attendees per event.

Due to the viral nature of LinkedIn, once someone RSVPs to your event, it shows up on the home profile of everyone that person is connected to, spreading the message for you.

Creating an event on LinkedIn is simple.  Answer a few questions and start promoting your event.  Send an invitation to the people who would be interested in the event based on region or niche. You will notice a wealth of opportunities from hosting your own event.

This image shows what the events page looks like in LinkedIn.

#4: Run an Advanced Search in Your Target Market

It’s so easy to generate leads from LinkedIn.  The advanced search function helps you get in touch with the exact people you’re going after.

Simply click on “advanced” on the top right side of your home page next to the search box.  This will take you to a clean page where you can input anything you need to find the exact lead you are seeking.  You can search by industry, keywords, company and title, to mention a few.

LinkedIn Advanced Search

#5:  Send Personal Messages

Once you find leads, you want to send them personalized messages.  The best way to drop any walls—and give yourself the best chance of making a sale—is to connect with someone on as many personal levels as possible. Look at their profile, find out which companies they’ve worked for in the past, which school they attended, what groups they’re in, listed hobbies and who your mutual connections are.  Then, write a personal message like this one:

Hi Tom,

I noticed that we’re both connected to Mary, Jeff and Bob; we both played basketball back in college; and we’re both in Toastmasters International speaking club.

I would love to connect with you to learn more about your experiences at Xyz Company. I believe there are a number of ways we could help one another.  Would you be free for a brief chat in the near future?

Looking forward to connecting soon and I’ll be sure to tell Mary I contacted you. I’m sure she would love to know I reached out to say ‘hi.’

Thanks,
Lewis

Personal messages seal the deal and give you a greater chance of future opportunities.

Now Go Grow Your Business With LinkedIn!

If you follow these tips, you’ll begin to understand why LinkedIn is the best social networking site for building your business. There are number of ways to attract leads, connect with powerful decision makers and market your business. LinkedIn’s niche-specific filters and search features can help you reach the right people in your field.

Make a point of staying active on LinkedIn. Continue to update your profile and add new contacts. The more you put into it, the more the entire network will work for you.

Are you using LinkedIn? How is it working for you? I look forward to hearing what success stories your LinkedIn network brings you. Share your comments below.

The pace is fast and this video is full of useful information. Be sure to read the list of takeaways below.

Here are some key takeaways from this video?

1. Listening is so important. The unstructured data you get from listening gives you more than surveys. Be sure to check out his tutorial: Grow Bigger Ears.
2. Establish your presence: Create passports to establish a presence.  Go where the people’s voice is rather than drive traffic to your site.
3. Monitor sales marketing and content marketing that drives leads instead of monitoring ROI.
4. Integrate social media into your customer support, sales and marketing.
5. Chris’ Twitter strategy:  12 to 1 ratio: promote 12 times more stuff from other people, and it pays to mix business with pleasure on Twitter
6. Chris is working one new books called Social Media 101 and and How Human Business Works and why this is important in today’s business world

What about you? What do you think about this video interview? How does listening on social media help your business? Please share your comments below.