What a year was 2011 for social media and marketing! Things moved at the speed of light, right? I watched and experienced first-hand the marketing and social media landscape change, consolidate, focus, develop and evolve all at the same time.
As I’ve said before, social media needs to be INTEGRATED into your overarching marketing plan. It’s not the magic pill. It’s not the hard sale, it’s the soft sell. It’s not going to blast your sales from $0 to $10,000 overnight. But social media is a powerful marketing tool that must be used in your marketing tactics today. And other important marketing tactics must not be ignored either.
So here are my 8 marketing trends to implement in your 2012 marketing plan. I think these marketing trends are a must for your SMB this year, following how the landscape “ended” in 2011 and are going to be very powerful in 2012. You need to be implementing them in your business to differentiate yourself from the competition and achieve the success you are looking for.
This is a guest post by Samia Zaky, who is in the social media daily trenches as a corporate Social Media Marketing Manager. She has developed robust and sustainable social media profiles and programs for different companies, knows the ropes, and gives us practical, valuable advice which I think you will find useful.
Twitter has been growing tremendously. In 2010, Twitter had 75 million user accounts. In 2011 (and the year is not over yet), there are 
I have tweeted and posted about this before, but this LITTLE mistake on your personal Facebook page is still overlooked by so many people. This is a BIG missed opportunity to promote your Facebook fan page every day. Read on…
“What’s the benefit? Should I even bother?” I often get asked this by SMB owners and my clients.
For an SMB, creating good, valuable content takes a lot of sweat, right? I know. So making this content SHARABLE is a must! 
There are a ton of tools out there – free and paid – to manage your daily social media activity. I have picked out the primary tools that I use on a daily bases, for myself and my clients, that I think will be the most useful to share with you, the SMB owner. It will make your day-to-day social media activities and tracking easy and manageable. They are all free: 
