A social media campaign is about creating and strengthening the bridge of communication with your customers. If you’re thinking about making your brand social – you need to be careful! Here are some common social media mistakes that can do more harm than good to your business, and simply damage your brand:

Not interacting with others

Social media calls for a two-way communication process. Always remember that you MUST interact with people if you want to make a splash with social media marketing. Try and be insightful in your comments and try to build relationships with your audience.

Not being authentic

PLEASE! Be yourself…and, always remember that you must connect with your audience on a more personal level. Social media demands that you be more transparent and authentic when you are trying to market your business online.

Avoid the ME!

Selling to social users is akin to signing the death certificate of your social media campaign. You should avoid telling users that you are the ‘Guru’. Instead, let your posts and updates reflect that. Users will take notice of you and when they do, you will love it – and, so will your revenue graph.

Target business days and not Holidays

If you’re a B2B marketer, target all your tasks during business days, and possibly during working hours. Avoiding holidays, weekends is a good idea. It’s quite obvious that your online audience won’t like dealing with anything that’s related to work on off-days.

That’s all for now, but trust us, there are many more mistakes you need to learn to avoid if you want your social media efforts to succeed. Watch out for Part 2 of this article, coming next week!

After encountering a series of security issues, Facebook has started experimenting with ‘Social Captchas’ to beef up the online security of its users. The social networking giant has started using a socially enabled login process to ensure that privacy of the users is not jeopardized. Instead of seeing disguised words (being used as security codifications), users will come across photos of their Facebook friends and will be asked to identify them.

If you are particular about statistics, then you will simply get amazed once you know that Facebook’s present membership has surpassed 600 million souls, or approximately 1 in every 10 people on the planet. With such large user base, Facebook has indeed become the guardian of personal data of around one tenth of the human race. Therefore, it has become an utmost necessity for Facebook officials to ensure that there’s no breach of security when it comes to personal information of the users. Mark Zuckerberg and his team has understood that they are always under fire for the different security lapses that hit the social networking site – and, have gotten a bit more serious about protecting all that personal information of the users from the malicious hackers and those numerous malware writers spread all over the Global Village.

This is why Facebook has started incorporating Social Captchas, but of course, with a bit of difference. The moment Facebook detects any unusual activity on your social account (for example: logging in from a place, then logging in from another location which is a thousand miles away), you will be asked to identify your Facebook pals, as a friend list will be produced in front of you. The built-in features of this application will allow you to narrow a set of friends who will be considered for the Captchas, and thus authenticate your access to a particular account.

So far, Social Captchas have been successful in safeguarding the privacy of Facebook users; but, the question still lies unanswered – “Will these Captchas serve as a long term solution to the problem of security breaches in various social networking sites?”

Analysts have predicted that a number of online marketing companies will be offering shares this year on the financial markets. Enterprises are basically going to provide public stock offerings in the social media universe. Social networking websites such as LinkedIn and online discount services such as Groupon are also going to become public companies. However, their main competition is Facebook that will make its foray as a public organization this year or in 2012.

This is exactly why advertisers are allocating larger budgets to marketing and advertising via social media. Digital marketing analysts have predicted that in 2011 around 10.8% of the online ad budget in the United States will be spent on social networking websites – of course, Facebook to be the biggest gainer among other social networking giants. The following year, this budget will go upto 12.1%. Social media is no longer looked upon as a platform that is merely used for peer connection. It has grown bigger and influential. Elaborate and complex marketing strategies are being devised for social media. Big brands are heavily relying on online media for promoting their business and ensuring successful ad campaigns.

Debra Aho Williamson, who is one of the chief analysts in eMarketer, has quoted – ‘all marketers are now incorporating social media marketing techniques in their business strategies, as they feel it is more logical and effective’.

When we check the statistics pertaining to online marketing and advertisement activities, we discover that about 8.7% of the 69 billion dollar online ad budget in 2011 will be relegated to social media and this will (possibly) reach 10.2% by the following year. Thus, you can see that social media is something to watch out for and be a part of in the coming years!