What Is Social Conversion
This post was made Jun 24, 2010 by Carlos del Rio
credit: Ivan Walsh
Earlier this week, and again today, I was presented with a new term: Social Conversion.
What is social conversion? I think that the best working definitions use one of the following as their starting point:
- A Social Conversion is when a person clicks your link on a social media platform.
- A Social Conversion is when a person shares an opinion about you.
Clicks = Conversion
If you are defining your conversion as the click-through to your site from a third party site you are putting the platform content as the pre-spin for your on page conversion funnel.
Tracking tasks include:
- Tagging your social media links.
- Segmenting the particular refer.
- Tracking visitor latency.
Click-through valuation reduces “Social Conversion” to a synonym for channel tracking, and with it the simplicity of adding just one step to the funnel from the on site conversion.
Opinion = Conversion
If you are defining your conversion as sharing your content or mentioning your brand you are making platform content creation your conversion.
Tracking tasks include:
- Site specific monitoring.
- Sentiment monitoring.
- Volume monitoring.
- Message reach.
- Platform user engagement.
If you are using content creation as your “Social Conversion” you are adding two steps to your conversion funnel, creation and action (click-through). You are also focusing on a more nebulous conceptual action.
Why Social Conversion should mean clicks.
Clicks are traffic, they also are clearly defined in your existing process and are highly traceable. They decouple you from less-reliable platform specific tools and allow the medium, social platforms, to be handled as a whole rather than piecemeal. Driving content creation on a platform is really just one tactic for driving click-through to your website. Your job in analyzing users and customers will always be easier when it is tied to a specific action that connects to your website, rather than a conceptual action that occurs off of your website.
I really enjoyed this post on social conversion. You provide very good tracking tasks. Thanks for joining us in #CROchat and sharing your thoughts.
I’ve also seen this term applied to conversions that originate through social sharing. I’m curious whether there’s evidence that these ‘social conversions’ really do behave differently than any other traffic segment. For example, Are they more swayed by social proof? In some cases I’ve seen claims that social elements will boost conversion by astounding amounts, 10x in one case.
I guess I’m wondering whether social elements are being used as a crutch to prop up otherwise weak funnels, and whether they’re being inappropriately applied due to a perception of them as panacea?
Social media traffic does generally behave different than say search engines as a channel. This is in part because there is a degree of social proof that is inherent in a link that comes from a social media platform.
But, in that same vein there are major similarities between referrals from non-social sites and social sites. The difference is that research minded people are more likely to come through one-to-one communication (like editorial links) and relational people are more likely to be coming in through many-to-many communication (social sites).
Social media is being, inappropriately, treated like a panacea, and there are many cases where social media widgets will damage your overall function/conversion on a website or landing page.
The type of social proof that these widgets provide can damage perceptions of exclusivity and be distracting for more impulsive users. I have never seen any data that suggests that displaying social widgets has any reliable correlation with on page conversion completion.