Social media meets the fundamental need to be heard, to be noticed, to be known and to be validated.

Social Media (SM) is not a trendy marketing tool but rather a key facet in your viral efforts to drive business to your website, enhance company recognition, build your brand, create market segments, meet your clients and prospective client needs for information and customer service, join communities, disseminate news, press releases, product launches, improve customer service, troubleshoot issues and listen to the chatter about your company.

It is hard to believe that Social Media is only 7 years old. Facebook started in 2004. Blogging did too. Twitter was born a few years later in 2006 and LinkedIn, the business networking site began in 2009. It’s unbelievable that something has impacted the marketing world with such a force in such a short period of time.

Social media has evolved from a powerful communication avenue to a key marketing channel. It offers a platform for clients, colleagues or prospects to discover you when they’re looking for reviews, comparing pricing, or researching offers. It is paramount for you and your company to maintain a presence, ensuring the opportunities for listening, effective online communications and increased visibility. It is essential that companies create and utilize a variety of social media platforms to cross promote, market and enhance their organization. Each channel offers an individual as well as combined opportunity for company-wide growth and expansion.

How do I Measure my results?

The ROI on SM is multi-faceted: it is a return on influence and before you have influence, you need visibility. You have the opportunity to increase followers, create deeper meaningful connections, develop relations with industry colleagues and associates, increase web traffic, RTs, “likes,” shares, +1s, and discussions about your company or brand and all this eventually translates into dollars. The list below applies to ALL social networking platforms.

• Return on engagement — the duration of time spent either in conversation or interacting with social objects, and in turn, what transpired that’s worthy of measurement.
• Return on participation — the metric tied to measuring and valuing the time spent participating in social media through conversations or the creation of, social objects.
• Return on involvement — similar to participation, marketers explored touchpoints for documenting states of interaction and tying metrics and potential return of each.
• Return on attention — In the attention economy, we assess the means to seize attention, hold it and as such measure the responses activities that we engender.
• Return on trust — A variant on measuring customer loyalty and the likelihood for referrals, a trust barometer establishes the state of trust earned in social media engagement and the prospect of generating advocacy and how it impacts future business.[1]

How much time should I expect to spend each day/ week to get best results?

You could easily spend a few minutes or a few hours per day engaging followers, creating relationships, and searching for content to share and building your brand. You have to be patient. Times builds results.

25 Eye-Popping Internet Marketing Statistics for 2012

The Internet Advantage

• Over 2 billion people use the Internet on a daily basis – this is about 30% of the world’s population, reaching more people, in more demographics than any other marketing tool.
• This represents a 480% increase in 2011 alone
• Over 245 million people or over 80% of Americans, use at least one social network.
• Creating a social media strategy is simple and inexpensive. You can easily integrate it into your existing marketing plan.

Videos:

Social Media Revolution Socialnomics 2011

What Is The Business Value of Social Media? – Advice from @Hubspot