Generally, when talking about sales leads and point of need requests in social media, the discussion is around ways to find and engage with them. (You can see a great video on how to do this with Salesforce Radian6 here.) Besides searching for leads, engaging with them and putting them through the sales cycle, there is an important step that needs to be completed to round-out the process.

Tracking and measuring sales leads that come through social media is incredibly important. There are three key questions that you need to answer when it comes to social media sales leads.

1. How Many Leads Are You Passing to Sales?

Beyond tracking volume and sentiment or Share of Voice it's important to determine what types of conversations are happening around your brand. In this case, tracking the number of sales leads that come in is incredibly important. How many, how often and are there trends? After all, selling your product or service is why you are on social in the first place, right? Sales leads are directly and most easily tied to a return on your investment in social. Be diligent in tracking those numbers.

2. How Successful are the Leads You are Passing Along?

Once you know how many sales leads are coming through social you also need to review how successful those leads are at ending in a closed sale. Be sure to track the overall dollar amount of closed sale opportunities from social and trend that amount over time. If there are things you can do to pass along stronger leads, talk to your sales team about these opportunities. When you are able to feel confident in each sales lead you pass along everybody wins. If there are leads that are unsuccessful, try to understand why. Generally the reasons won't be within your control, but they can help you better understand your audience. If you are losing sales leads because people are coming in with a misunderstanding about what you do or what you provide, perhaps content can be created that helps.

3. Where are the Leads Coming From?

Be sure to track which of your social platforms are generating the most leads. This can be an excellent case to boost efforts in a specific area or to allocate money towards paid or promoted posts within those platforms. Also look beyond the actual sales lead. If possible, look at who on your team interacted with the person in the past, and what type of information or help was provided to make them want to reach out for more information on your product. Understanding why the lead is coming in is just as important as how.

Taking into account the above information will give you a more complete picture of your social sales leads to help you ramp up efforts to increase them over time.

This post originally appeared on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud blog.