This is an update to "Social Media for the Rest of Us” dated 1/7/2013.

You’ve been to the presentations, listened to the webinars and read the blog posts about how important social media is for business marketing. But are you still skeptical about its importance to your particular business?

The drive to master scheduled posts, targeted audiences and compelling CTAs is squeezing the “social” out of social media marketing and could be alienating your prospective customers.

Fresh content is a must. With daily posting and an ever-shifting newsfeed, encouraging users to share their own content about your brand is a great (free) way to increase brand awareness and boost positive reviews on your business and products. What is the secret to drawing in customers to post their own user generated content to your pages and about your brands? 

You have been faithfully pursuing digital media marketing for your business all year. Or maybe you haven’t. Either way, it’s time to assess whether the results were worth your effort.

I saw an interesting graphic recently that outlined how long content lasts. It broke down several of the top online marketing avenues: a blog post, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. What did it find? That each of these marketing platforms have a different expiration date for content.

In marketing, it’s easy to find people stressing the importance of conversions. Most B2B marketers will name lead generation as a main strategy. But, should you be optimizing your website and marketing only for conversions? What about the importance of increasing traffic?

A large portion of content marketing and social media marketing is actually developing that content and those social media posts. Once you have the original content and the relevant and interesting social media posts created, what’s next? If you build it, they will come. Right? In theory, this may be true, but in reality if you want your content and social media posts to be found you have to consider the way that your target audience is searching for comparable information online.

Here’s a business resolution for the new year:  Be PRO-active instead of RE-active in your digital marketing. Your effort will be repaid many times over – and it’s not that tricky to implement. Let’s get started!

There has been a lot of buzz in the marketing world about what we can expect to see in the coming year. With the speed and direction of online marketing constantly increasing and changing, there are plenty of opportunities for online marketers to be on the lookout for. Now is when you should be knee deep in strategic planning for the next year. The end of the year is a great time to take inventory of what went right, be aware of areas that can be improved, and to predict the new trends for the upcoming year.