Firms can use social media to conduct a conference with potential clients and also save on travel expenses. They can hire new employees by conducting interviews and demonstrate their product to potential clients by using video conferencing. For a new firm which is looking to enter into a competing market, improved technology helps them to minimize expenses and increase profit and productivity. Along with social media, video conferencing can be used as an effective business tool to get in touch with customers and employees living beyond their geographical zones. This not only saves money but also travel time.

Nowadays candidates like to interact with executives of a company before they apply for a post. They like to gather as much information as they can before they decide to apply in a company. Through this interaction, they can decide if a company is being honest with them. A company has to interact with them to ensure that they exist and are not a hoax.

A firm which does not have an office in every city of the world can attract customers using popular social networking sites such as twitter or Facebook. It can post updates about product launches and events in order to increase traffic flow. In this way it will not only increase number of potential clients but also popularize it’s name with minimal expenses at it’s own disposal.

The field of social media is constantly changing, and as such it is quite difficult to make any predictions about it, and expect it to hold true for a long time to come. Still, by observing prevailing trends on social media in the last quarter of 2011, we have made three predictions, which we believe could hold true for at least the first half of 2012. Here they are:

Mobile users will outshine PC users in terms of social media usage

Even in Q4 2011, mobile users were almost on the verge of taking over PC users in terms of social media usage. In 2012, the former are bound to finish the job. It can be expected that within Q2 2011, mobile users will very likely take over PC users, and access more social media content than those using any other medium can possibly do, on any given day. There will also be a huge rise in the number of mobile websites, as more and more people stop using their PCs to browse the Internet, using their smartphones to do the same, instead.

Rate of usage of social SEO will reach an all time high, with more UGC

UGC, or User Generated Content, has been gaining plenty of attention from social media marketers for quite some time now. These days, if a person is planning to buy a new TV, he does not check ads as much as he used to do even a couple years ago. He logs on to Facebook or Twitter, and looks for brands of TVs that have received the most recommendations. Once that is over, he heads over to Yelp, to find out just how good the product is. All these sites feature nothing but user generated content. In 2012, this tendency is almost guaranteed to rise to a great extent, among consumers across the globe.

Every business will have an app for their customers

Even in 2011, a lot of businesses have been attracting probable future customers by offering them smartphone apps for free. In 2012, this trend is bound to continue, with almost every business out there getting some sort of app built for customers. And each app is likely to have buttons linked to the companies’ social media networks, so that users can share those with their friends, thereby boosting the number of downloads of the apps even more.

The field of social media is always evolving, and the success of businesses now depend on careful monitoring and usage of the various channels by company personnel. As time progresses, this trend is likely to continue. And that’s something we do not need to predict.

Each day holds a new record for each of the networking sites, who are constantly competing with each other to increase their popularity. Inclusion into a circle of friends having similar aims in life can be mutually beneficial. You will find ones who will have similar interests as yours, with whom you can soon start a conversation. Interacting with a new person in the real world is not very easy for a few of us, but the virtual world of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ can be used with full potential to increase popularity of your business. Interaction with people from various backgrounds can give you new ideas and improve visibility of your business among a wider audience.

Gone are the days when a business would be promoted by an advertisement in the yellow pages or newspapers, in a new and modern era where people prefer to interact directly with each other, you must not lag behind. Give a head start to your business by finding a circle of friends with whom you can bank on for a profit. With inclusion of new features, applications, groups and communities, networking sites are able to draw in users from various backgrounds. Social networking sites are flooded with members who have different aims to achieve in life. Finding a place for yourself in them will not be very hard.

When you create a public profile in a networking site, you are looking for an audience. You have to make your page engaging to draw interest of people who matter. Your page has to to be as riveting as possible, with a good description about your business and company logo as a profile picture. You must see that your audience is not lacked of any information about your business, but also keep in mind that beating about the bush about your business will also not do any good. Keep description about your business as simple and captivating as possible, so that you can reach out to a target audience. Just creating a profile is not going to help your business. Promoting your business by keeping your web page active must be your aim. You need to contact your target audience in order to seal a deal with them and convert them into your customers in future.

Do you regularly run social media campaigns for various clients? Then maintaining proper ROI for all those clients must be a major headache for you. Well, there certainly is a fine balance that you have to maintain in every single social media marketing campaign that you may run, between correlation and ROI.

So, what is this correlation, you ask? Well, simply put, it is the relationship between business success achieved by the company, and the ties of social media to that success. It can never be proved with 100% certainty, unless you are able to show that the profit margins soared as the company reached out to more and more customers via social media. A somewhat ambiguous proof can be obtained by comparing social media stats with profit margins though.

Even with the slight ambiguity, ROI vs. Correlation studies can help you gain confidence from top level management, who happen to control the kind of investment the company makes in social media. If you are running social media campaigns regularly, then this is certainly a method you may wish to follow, in order to help the management realize just how social media is helping their business, and why they should continue investing in it.

Have your inexperienced employees been making some major mistakes while interacting with others on the social media accounts used for promoting your business? Have you been considering drastic measures like closing down the accounts and creating new ones for carrying on social media marketing for your company? Well, guess what – that route is closed! Even if you manage to build another account, the people already on the last account will think twice, or even thrice, before accepting your requests to have them join your new network. In fact, in the worst case, the brand name of your business may also be viewed with suspicion, since this kind of action is usually taken by spammers.

So, no, creating new accounts on social media networks and scrapping the old ones are definitely out of the picture. What you can do, however, is try to mend the reputation of your brand on the networks. Here are some tips that should help with that:

1. Have your social media marketers post apology messages on the networks, where any kind of rude comments may have been published. This will not set things right with every offended user, but will at least prove that your company is ready to accept blame for mistakes and work towards improving its standing.

2. If customers have been posting comments criticizing your products/ services on the networks, and your team has been ignoring those, now is the time to fix the situation. Be sure that every such comment is followed up, and the issues resolved in a constructive manner. However, if your team has been deleting those comments, then there might not be much you can do now, except paying attention to any new comments of that kind. In that case, you are likely to lose trust of a lot of people, but hopefully, you should be able to gain the trust of some new ones.

3. Lastly, make sure that the employees assigned with the task of carrying out social media activities for your company are knowledgeable enough about social media to get the job done properly. If you believe that some of them might not be adequately experienced, then it is certainly a good idea to send them to a social media marketing workshop of some kind, before they resume their tasks.

Mending the reputation of your company on social media networks can be pretty difficult when a lot of things have already gone wrong. However, with proper knowledge and corrective action, you should be able to get your SMM campaign back on track.