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Health & Fitness

Is Social Media Losing its Power? Look for These Social Media Trends in 2012

Look for These Social Media Trends in 2012 Learn how successful small businesses are using Social Media to turn prospects into customers and customers into raving fans!

Multimedia information sharing has taken front and center stage. It has created even more of a hotbed, spurring a bigger social media frenzy on Facebook than ever before. Smart Phones are taking over our universe with built-in high quality digital still and video cameras that rival most high end brands, combined with built-in aps allowing users to post directly to social media sites. If you peruse Facebook at any given time you will see a montage of photos, videos and music scattered throughout friends’ pages.

People love to get to know one another by sharing their thoughts, moods, and feelings through the different types of media, and other folks just love to view them. It’s like back in the day, when you would have friends over to share your latest event or vacation through slide shows or albums. Only now you get to share with more people at once, and you don’t have to spend any gas money.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, owner and co-founder of Facebook, “The amount (of information) a user shares today is twice the amount they shared a year ago.” One can only imagine what will happen exponentially over the next year while the number of Facebook users tend to increase simultaneously.

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Speaking of multimedia, You Tube is currently the second largest search engine in the world and is owned by Google! It gets 2 billion views per day, and gearing up to compete with broadcast television.

Expect to see more Mobile Apps, customized to restaurants and small businesses, to drive customers to their locations, making it easy to read menus from mobile phones or see what’s on sale. Business owners will engage their customers where they are. The customer no longer has to listen to a monologue advert on television, but has the power to interact in a dialogue basis instead.

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Small businesses will engage with their customers even more than ever before on Facebook through website creation and fan pages. You can’t even watch a television, radio or even print add without hearing or seeing “Follow us on Facebook” or a “Follow us on Twitter”. Presidential campaigns are now engaging in using Social Media as a form of creating raving fans and gaining influence. Smart business owners are integrating their “old school” marketing efforts into cross channel marketing, using current on-line tools to get the one, two punch.

So what does all this mean to the small business owner?

Trends are changing rapidly in the world of Social Media and you need to stay informed. Stay tuned for our next article on how to bring your off-line customers on-line, and why you should.

You can also click here for a short free video series on how to avoid getting ripped off by a Social Media Expert. ---click here---

If you would like to learn about our Social Media Power Workshop event coming  March 1st, 2012.     ---click here---

Mary Borse, Bigdogz Marketing 
Copyright 2012

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