Internet Marketing Strategy 2.0

Are you wondering how your peers are using social media? Wondering if you should focus on Google+ or Pinterest?

Marty Smith: How are marketers using social media? More and more as it turns out. The Social Media Examiner just released its yearly state of social media marketing report with these findings:

Major Findings

• Measurement and targeting are top areas marketers want to master: Forty percent of all social media marketers want to know how to measure the return on investment (ROI) of social media and find customers and prospects.
   
• Video marketing holds the top spot for future plans: A significant 76% of marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing, making it the top area marketers will invest in for 2012.
   
• Marketers seek to learn more about Google+: While only 40% of marketers are using Google+, 70% of marketers want to learn more about it and 67% plan on increasing Google+ activities.
   
• Top three benefits of social media marketing: The number-one benefit of social media marketing is generating more business exposure (reported 85% of marketers), followed by increasing traffic (69%) and providing marketplace insight (65%).
   
• Top five social media networks/tools for marketers: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and YouTube were the top five social media tools used by marketers, in that order.
   
• Social media marketing still takes a lot of time: The majority of marketers (59%) are using social media for 6 hours or more each week, and a third (33%) invest 11 or more hours weekly.
   
• Social media outsourcing underutilized: Only 30% of businesses are outsourcing some portion of their social media marketing, only a slight increase from 28% in 2011.
  
  Full report download: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport2012.pdf
  
  http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-industry-report-2012/  

From the article: "I find Twitter the most essential social media tool for Internet Marketers on many levels, mainly because of its search API.

Unlike Facebook's and Google Plus's non-existent search options, Twitter makes it easy to go through the huge amounts of updates being published every minute and find those which are relevant (and important) to your brand.

Twitter search is priceless for various tasks:

- Track updates from any niche conference or event (through the official hashtag). In this particular case, archiving is very essential because your archive will let you find testimonials for your next event or quotes for your event coverage, etc.

- Monitor most recent link building opportunities. I for one use Twitter search to instantly react to niche guest posting invites;

- Monitor your own brand mentions (both linked and unlinked). Here's one post I did previously on awesome Twitter search operators that let you filter out all the clutter and track only very essential brand mentions (for example, filter out Twitter updates that contain links and only listen to "real" conversations);

- Keep an eye on your competitors and how they are doing on Twitter (for example, find negative mentions and be there to offer a better alternative)

- Identify active users and influencers within your niche (and get connected to them).

The free Google Spreadsheet I am reviewing in this article can help you with all the above tasks: it collects tweets, archives them and lets you analyze them! [..]"

Read the entire article: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-archive-twitter-search-results-in-a-google-spreadsheet-and-analyze-them