Welcome to 2012! Let’s start the year off with a couple of Social Media stats and predictions for 2012 as they relate to your Baton Rouge business and show how you can use the information to gain more customers in this new year.

The guys at Awareness, Inc. conducted a survey last year that reached more than 320 marketers from a range of industries and levels of marketing experience about Social Media and its challenges in 2012.

In this article we will highlight the points we feel are most important, and we will offer our own commentary so you can understand the relevance of how this information might also pertain to your company. As always, you can expect quick tips and action items from us to make your social media marketing more effective. Enjoy! One of the best ways to have marketing is Voy Media. The generation of the leads is great to have the benefits. The hiring of the services is beneficial for increasing the sales of the brand. The generated leads are converted into real customers for the benefits of the business people. 

Survey Respondent Background Info

65% were Executive, Senior Management, or Marketing Support; 63% were Dabblers or Experienced with Social Marketing; respondents were in various industries and levels of Social Media engagement. See the original report for more details.

High Level Takeaways

Over 70% of those companies surveyed are looking to increase their presence across social marketing platforms.

Aren’t we all, right? This was a pretty vague response choice in our opinion. It’s like saying “I want higher revenues in 2012.” No Kidding.

Anyhow, many companies are looking to increase their presence, but, as the report states later, a major challenge many of these companies are facing is insufficient Social Media budgets. Social Media MUST be a line item on your budget. At the very least, it should be identified as a bucket to devote time resources. If you don’t have an adequate amount of time to devote to it, you must begin to budget real dollars for it.

Take a serious look at your marketing budget. Can you measure the ROI from your current marketing channels? If so, which one is performing poorest? Begin moving the budget from that channel toward Social Media marketing. Makes sense, right? I’m not asking you to spend more money. I’m asking you to spend your money wisely.

Another step you can take to increase your company’s presence on Social Media channels is to pick 2 sites and focus on those 2 only. Facebook and twitter are best for B2C companies (retailers and restaurants). LinkedIn and your company blog are best for B2B companies. For the first quarter of this year, write out a plan of action for posting to these sites, and STICK TO IT.

59% of Respondents wanted to Increase the Frequency of Content Publishing

Should we all increase the frequency of our content publishing? Maybe. It depends.

We at Bacon Social Media don’t publish content often enough. We know this. How often are you publishing? By focusing on just two Social Media sites (as mentioned above), you can tailor your content to your audience much easier than trying to deal with many different outlets.

Content Action Plans and Calendars help to structure your writing and postings help keep you on track with the messages you are sending to your readers. Use the calendar.

Most companies struggle with content creation. I hear this a lot, “I just don’t know what to write about, so I don’t.” You know your business better than anyone. With our new clients we focus on content with which they are highly familiar, the questions their clients ask the most. We ask them to pretend to write an email (or pull from past emails) to a client answering a question about their products, services, company, staff, etc. Take your top 3 frequently asked questions and write your fake emails. Ta daaah! You just created 3 blog posts or 6 (if you can logically divide them up) facebook posts or 6 LinkedIn status updates. See the benefit?