One of the biggest frustrations for businesses is turning all of their online activities into actual sales. You can have 50,000 Twitter followers and post to your blog three times a day, but if doing these things isn’t ultimately leading to customers, you might as well be banging your head against the wall.

In this video, NMX speaker Ann Handley from MarketingProfs talks about this very problem. How do you turn social into sales?

[youtube]http://youtu.be/g1VRExiBb04[/youtube]

To add to Ann’s great advice, I would also say this: Before you decide there’s no ROI in what you’re doing, make sure you’re measuring ROI correctly. If you’re using traditional techniques, you might not see great numbers, but that might mean you’re looking at the wrong stats.

For example, if only one person bought something after posting about a sale on Facebook, the ROI isn’t looking so hot. But if 500 people became aware of your brand due to others sharing about your sale, and even just 10% of them become future customers, suddenly Facebook’s ROI looks a lot better.

At the same time, make sure you’re not reporting stats with a spin just to convince yourself that there’s a good ROI of your online activities. Using the same example, if you made 50 sales after posting about something on Facebook, that might be look good at first, but if the majority of those sales were people who were already your customers and would have purchased something anyway, regardless of your Facebook posting activities, the numbers suddenly don’t look so hot.

So measure, measure, measure…and always make sure you’re measuring the right things and analyzing the numbers properly.

If you think Ann Handley is one smart cookie just like I do, don’t miss her live on stage at NMX in Vegas this January! Check out Ann and all of the other BusinessNext speakers here.