Social Media Marketing 2012

By Author: Joseph Augustine
Total Articles: 31
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All businesses seek to either increase brand awareness or generate sales or leads. Most of the businesses prefer social media. Focus on the social media marketing trends that can measurably contribute to your business goals. 2012 is about one fourth over and already there have been many new trends in social media marketing that offer new and interesting ways to expand brand awareness and generate sales leads. Let’s see how & what changes have few popular social media has brought this year.
LinkedIn:
Most people associate LinkedIn to connect with people for either job recruiting or business development, or just professional networking. LinkedIn is quietly getting more social attention now days. In this process LinkedIn is getting more useful to marketers.
Few marketers leverage’s the LinkedIn Company page as:
*Where you can post status updates from your company,
*List your products and services,
*Display recommendations written by customers, etc…
LinkedIn also offers a company page follow button similar to that of Facebook’s like button. By adding the LinkedIn follow button ...
... to your website or blog you can grow your company followers and keep them informed through status updates and announcements.
Facebook:
As you know Facebook has recently released the timeline feature for pages. For a complete summary of the Facebook page timeline features and marketing opportunities, one of the most noticeable changes in Facebook pages timeline is the new poster as shown above in the Find and Convert Facebook page.
For example: If you can see a lot of real estate based posts at the very top of your page. You can change your poster image as often as you want. However, Facebook rules prevent selling or advertising an offer or like-gating from your poster.
Pinterest:
Pinterest is a
*Low risk,
*Low resource social media outpost,
*It’s worth experimenting, especially if any aspect of your business is social.
Pinterest is currently used by B2C brands the most. Pinterest has taken the social media landscape by storm. There is one thing Pinterest goes on well for all brands, is that drives traffic and links. Pinterest also allows any brand to get creative. To find brands on Pinterest just conduct a Google search you can get interesting results. You can create links that have SEO value, by pinning images to theme-centric boards that link to your blog or website.
For example, if you’re a B2B company that holds events or attends conferences, pin your pictures to Pinterest that you have taken at those events. Be sure to pin those pictures from your website so the link back flows to your website or blog. If you’re a B2C company you should have a field day experimenting with Pinterest.
Twitter:
Twitter has already grown much more in the last 9 months than in the last 5 years and this trend is expected to continue long.
So do your best to craft your content tweets, @replies and promotional tweets all with a seamless style that matches your personality and brand. Ideally, you just want people to read your tweets and feel naturally compelled to click on your links and retweet you.
But you have to add value and have no agenda or attachment to making the sale, yet you have to be strategic and mindful about how you tweet. Then you’ll see a marked improvement in your retweet and click-through rates.
Benefits:
In a survey of 700 marketers from all over the globe, Wildfire App discovered that nearly all marketers find value from social media and that 75% of marketers plan to increase their media spending in 2012,&in the upcoming year.
The top few benefits highlighted by these marketers are:
*Increased brand awareness and the ability to engage in dialogue directly with their customers. When comparing with last year (2011) Social Media Marketing Industry Report’s that they have found 88% of marketers also indicated, increased exposure to be the number-one benefit of social media marketing.
*Small businesses have reached a tipping point in social media use, where only 10% of small businesses surveyed in the Ad-ology of 2012 Marketing Forecast reported that they would not use social media marketing in 2012. That’s remarkable because it’s down from 24% in 2011 and 39% in 2010.
*More Business people investing in Social Media.
*With limited budgets and staffs, it’s no wonder that marketers found resources to be their number-one challenge i.e. to their social media efforts.
Now it’s Your Turn!