Have you defined your social media marketing funnel? If not, you should.

Like your marketing funnel, your social media marketing funnel defines how you plan to channel your prospects into your sales cycle. The marketing funnel is your overall plan. It covers every aspect of your marketing strategy and how you plan to drive your prospects to the final sale. Your social media marketing funnel is a little more defined, dealing only with your social media marketing plan.

Like a real funnel, your marketing and social media marketing funnels should be wider at the top and narrower at the bottom. That is, you’ll have more prospects at the top of the funnel and fewer at the bottom while those true prospects who are ready to close on the sale right now filter through the funnel completely and into your sales cycle. Here’s an example of a social media marketing funnel at work.

• Social Bookmarking – Used to promote some of social networking and to draw in casual friends and fans to our social networking profiles.
• Facebook, Twitter and Linked – Social media networking profiles with interaction with followers and fans at a superficial level. Little real marketing takes place here. This is just to get the conversation going and develop initial relationships. From here we drive prospects to our blog.
• Forums – Like social networking, we’re driving prospects to our blog and interacting in a more superficial and less direct marketing way.
• Social Bookmarking – Unlike social networking, the object is not necessarily to drive people to the blog. It’s to promote our content, however, we want to drive traffic to our most important content on our blog and static website.
• Blog – With our blog we hope to get a little more intimate with our friends and fans. Here we get into more in-depth discussions about our company and products/services. We are developing deeper relationships with people and interacting on a more personal and professional level. We are not striving to close sales on the blog, although we hope it happens. Our real goal is to drive traffic to our most important sales pages and to get e-mail sign ups for our newsletter and e-mail marketing campaigns.
• E-mail - More personal and a deeper professional connection takes place in our e-mail marketing campaigns. Our subscribers get more special offers and deals than anyone else. In fact, we frequently have exclusive offers just for our e-mail prospects. We use e-mail marketing to drive traffic to our sales pages where we strive for high conversions.

Notice that at each level we are getting deeper personally and professionally. The real marketing takes place at the e-mail level. At the blog level we are marketing but the goal is to drive traffic to the sales pages where the closing takes place – and we want to get people to sign up for our e-mail list where they will really get the best deals. Everything above blogging is designed to drive people into the blog and deeper into our cove.

You probably noticed that social bookmarking is in this funnel twice. That’s because it really does serve more than one purpose. We are trying to get people to our blog and to our social networks, we are also promoting all of our content. It doesn’t really matter which door people walk through as long as they become a customer.

This is just an example of a social media marketing funnel. But I hope it illustrates the importance of your funnel. If you need help designing a social media road map, or funnel, then let us know.