New Social Media Marketing Features in Winter Release

In our 2012 Winter Release, we added social media sharing features to help you expand your reach through social media. We made it easy for your leads and customers to share your content across their social networks – and more notably – for you to track the performance of the shares and effectively generate leads through those shares.

After talking with many of you about how you market your business online, we saw many were trying to figure out how social media could help their business. We were compelled to identify a meaningful benefit of social media we could make easier for you to obtain. To do this, we undertook many additional interviews. In many discussions, it was difficult for people to describe to me why social media was meaningful to their businesses. There were a lot of things being done that – albeit cool – had not proven themselves as anything more than a gimmick.

One woman I had spoken to shared a benefit around social media in her business. She said the benefit for her was to increase her reach. I asked her to tell me a little more, she explained, “If I create content and send it via email, my reach is that list. If in that email, it is easy for a user to share it, they do and with each share I expand my reach.” As I continued to talk with users, I shared this benefit of expanding reach, they were excited at the idea and many were already trying to do similar things with their blogs.

With more interviews it became very clear the benefit that we needed to deliver for this release was the ability for users to expand their reach through social media. We accomplished this challenge five different ways.

Social Media Content Sharing
We focused on making it easy for your contacts to share your content. We improved the sharing capabilities in Drag ‘n Drop email messages and added sharing to Web Forms. We improved the Facebook Like button so it will post to recipients’ Facebook News Feeds when they click the ‘Like’ button and added next-generation support for Google Plus (+1) to the options for sharing.

Social Media Lead Generation
When looking at the hosted email page, we knew something was missing. We realized that when people share emails with their social networks, it acts like a landing page. We asked the question, “What’s a landing page without a clear call to action?” As a result, we made it easy to add a Web Form to shared emails allowing you to have a very specific call to action for your emails shared across social networks.

Social Media Marketing Performance
Given that people can share emails you sent and probably have new leads that are being generated, the next step was to help you identify who took action as well as the overall social media marketing performance of your email broadcast. We created a report that shows the people who clicked to share, how many page views were generated and the number of new opt-ins from social media. This should give you a good indicator on how well your marketing campaigns resonate with your list and their friends.

Social Sharing Triggered Actions
One of the most important features of Infusionsoft is Automation based on user behavior. It’s now possible to track the influencers on your list who click to share your content so you can run additional actions like tagging, adding them to certain Follow-Up Sequences and more. This is a great way for you to discover who influencers are on your list or notify sales reps that one of their leads clicked to share content.

Social Media Content Publishing
We also recognized that you already have reach in social media through your followers and fans. We made it easy for you to speak to that existing audience by adding the ability to announce to your Facebook and Twitter accounts when you send a broadcast, or add a new Web Form. This provides a convenient way for you to notify your social media audience about new content that you have created.

These five distinct features drive the point home that social media is a great tool for expanding your reach and generating new leads. As always, by mixing a great marketing technique with Infusionsoft, something as simple as the sharing of emails becomes a way to generate leads, segment marketing, identify hot leads, and gauge social media effectiveness.

Watch this video to see how we enhanced our social media marketing features in our software:

Have you tried out the new social media marketing features in Infusionsoft yet? I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below.