Comparing the status of social media five years ago and social media of today makes a vast difference. Famous present social media communities like Facebook and Twitter leveled up to a higher rank these past days, and they have developed a creative way to empower common users by expressing themselves in blogs, forums, videos, photos, files and more.

However, social media development has come to a different approach in today’s times. It is not just a simple medium for expressing insights online, but it has even the source to find potential clients for business promotion. YouTube alone even reached a number 24, 17,800 visitors already, and so does Facebook with 33, 12, 600 visitors. Businessmen analyzed how social media boost their marketing strategy, that’s why it is being used for product promotion and advertisements already; particular on Facebook wherein users can like a product’s Facebook link. With this, promoters understand the current pulse of costumers and they know how dominant their product’s current status is.

What is the function of social media in the field of marketing? Well, Social Media does change the way people find out about new products and services. In fact, social media services guarantee maximum endorsements corresponded with strategic goals and objectives. Media Master PR and Advertising illustrates how social media plays a vital role in social networking, blog marketing, reputation networking, social bookmarking, and viral marketing. With these strategies, advertisers stay competitive and updated with the latest trends onto what how they’re going to make their products inviting.

Among the numerous social sites scattered in the web, MySpace and Facebook are two of the competing social sites used for social media marketing, since these two are close to 200 million registered subscribers. Both sites have their own advantages, especially to MySpace which “doesn’t place any artificial limit on the number of friends that [subscribers] are allowed to have, so if [they] can attract thousands of followers, this won’t present [them] a problem,” a written statement from Social Media News and Trends. Apparently, Facebook can also be extremely effective as it forces you to build your relationships and to add value. With this, it builds trust and ultimately makes contacts more likely to buy.

Are you planning to make your marketing strategic and innovative? The social media community guarantees to make the most of your product. Social media will develop your brands in the most comprehensive and advanced method ever known to technology today.

The speed of social media’s innovation is increasingly progressing. According to Nielsen Online, Twitter even had a record-breaking percentage of 1,382% on February 2009, “registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the UD for the month”, a statement of David Armano. Facebook even outwitted other social sites especially MySpace. With the status of Facebook nowadays, you may never know how far these social sites can contribute for tomorrow’s occurrence.

In the field of industry, business companies today embrace Social Media’s principles and marketing strategies to maximize their products’ increase. Pam Dyer, writer of Pamorama even stated that “we’re in the midst of a fundamental shift in communication” that’s why there are existing tools applied for social media which, however, results terrifically or slightly. This is based onto what trends the social media can maximize in order to gain the targeted allocation.

The lists below, as written by Gini Dietrich, are the five social media trends.

Video

YouTube has gained lots of subscribers for the past five years already. Watching a video is customary, but posting a video wherein viewers are free to write their comments and reactions is a lot more different. According to Dietrich, its online traffic was greatly affected and even quadruples when she posted a video. How’s that for a change?

Search

How would you like your site to be on the top list when a viewer searches for products on the search engines online? Well, that greatly affects how social media makes this possible. It must be understood how people looks something on the web. As an expert of Social Media, you must know how to go with the flow.

Location

I remember how presidential candidates penetrated Facebook during their campaigns to win for the previous 2010 election. Compared to the election campaign last six years ago, posters of numerous candidates were minimized this year. This is because they did all their operation online—less work, more results!

Mobile

Cash goes beyond than bringing lots of money paper on our pockets and wallets. With the innovation we have today, we can purchase anything what we want with just a scan away! The store can just scan our mobile phones and automatically gets the credit. They will simply deduct the amount from our check account. Isn’t it innovative?

Social Media Policies

These are the policies Dietrich enumerated and must be included in the conventional policies: Be responsible, authentic, and productive; considerate to the audience; respects copyrights; understands community, and more!

Now, reading these trends, what other trends are ought to be considered with?

“significantly increase a company’s online results.”

Social Media Marketing (SoMed) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are two current online businesses that, according to recent news, compete for the same budget, which most likely, has similar market services. Defining both industries by Wikipedia, Social Media Marketing is a term that describes the use of social networks,

online communities, blogs, or any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service. Enclosed in SoMed are tools that we are using now namely Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and many more. Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web page from search engines like Google and Yahoo. With both industries autonomously competing, an independent study unveils the legitimacy of both SoMed and SEO combined can “significantly increase a company’s online results.” Is this possible?

This recent study observed the comparison of companies who depended on one strategy and companies who incorporated both. They have found out that the SoMed’s strategies and SEO techniques both applied to a certain company has great visible results. The premeditated company benefited from “greater Internet exposure, website traffic and were less affected by market fluctuations.”

Scott Moir, founder of Irbtrax SEO Social Media Internet marketing observed the unique combination of “the science of SEO and the art of Social Media. As a result, aggressive companies are integrating these two practices in order to maximize their online results and return on investment.” Irbtrax comprehends that SoMed and SEO, though different in methods and platforms being used, have a lot in common. These differences cover the following method:

Mediums for Traffic Increase

SEO increases traffic by improving the company’s Page Rankings or enhancing Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) for a particular keyword phrase, while SoMed uses a third party platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Specific Work Details

SoMed focuses on the quality of outbound content while SEO emphasizes quality inbound links.

Methods to Attract Visitors

SEO strives to optimize a website for search engines while enhancing visitor experience resulting in higher conversions. SoMed seeks to increase the sharing of content while improving visitor interactivity to generate business.

Companies who would apply this principle will surely gain maximum return of investments. With the internet’s power and “ability”, SEO’s and SoMeds will rapidly bring the company’s product on top.

In recent days Facebook has been persuading its users to review its privacy option. There have been so many privacy problem issues around the world who used facebook. Now users are given the chance to configure its facebook profile either they want it to be public or just exclusive to all their friends.

Here are some new options how to make your profile set on private:

1. Some of your information is viewable by everyone.
2. Your list of friends may also be public.
3. You can hide yourself from Web searches.
4. Beware of third-party applications.
5. Go over your list of friends.
6. Create custom friends groups.
7. Customize your status posts.
8. Let your friends know you have boundaries — in person.
9. Never assume complete privacy.

You can all change the privacy settings of your profile if you want only your friends who can view you profile, picture, update and shout out. There are four options on every privacy settings of your profiles: Everyone, friends of friends, only friends and customize. What makes good in these new option settings since you can also customize the third party program on facebook like games and quizzes if you would like this program to access your personal pages.

Recent studies showed that more women are into social media activities than men. The figure sounds good and accurate but there are also some questions that also arise, as to the veracity of the recent survey.

In a survey conducted by www.royal.pingdom.com it showed that 16 social network sites of the 19 included in the survey have more women than men. Interestingly, the sites that men have more numbers than women are Digg, Slashdot and Reddit. The Slashdot alone registered a total of 82 percent male users.

The rest if the 16 social media sites are controlled by women social net-workers. The sites include Linkedin, Myspace, Friendster, Xanga, Ning, Hi5, Imeem, Stumbleupon, Friendfeed, Delicious, Classmates, Bebo, Last.fm, Livejournal, and Twitter. It said that 53 percent were women users while men are only 47 percent.

However, there are also strong questions that arise from the said survey revealing that at least 25 percent of men are using fake accounts using women faces to lure more friends in their social marketing campaigns.
But the site whop conducted the survey has maintained and firmly stand on the result, saying that they based their survey on site demographics gathered from a Google ad planner.

To help you to have a clearer idea to the recent survey, I would like to present here data which is the result of that recent survey conducted.

Tom Foremski in his blog said gone are the days, when traditional press releases gets published, after editing and revision by mainstream media editors.

The so-called traditional PR is a statement boasting the services or products of certain companies for their openings, mergers, financial status, product promos and many more announcements.

Foremski said traditional PRs are now nearly useless as they contain meaningless quotes usually made by company executives. In other words, these so-called “Praise Release,” according to Foremski should now be changed to a most meaningful and presentable format.

Praise releases are submitted free by company executives at the expense of PRnewswire, Businesswire and other information outlets. Foremski proposes that this system has to end and a new system has to come out. Here’s how he wants it done:

He said deconstruction of press releases should be made and special sections be created to give a new life for the publishers to pre-assemble the story. The companies, he said, should only provide a brief description of what the announcement would like to emphasize and leave the spin to the media editors. In this way, the time of preparing the Praise Release would be lessened, as well as it would also help the media editors easily edit the article according to their taste.

MEETin or MEETin group is a social community or web 2.0 founded in Washington DC, USA in 2003. The website is dedicated to people providing casual social environment for free membership. MEETin group has now been enjoyed in 90 cities worldwide and has a total members of (90,000) ninety thousand.

On March 14, 2003, MEETin.org was launch and established by Mikey Heard in Washington DC, USA for the purpose of connecting people socially in the city. After the DC chapter became popular and rapid increasingly active the administrator of the site add 16 chapters in the US cities and now expand worldwide cities. The web now named and known as the identities of MEETin group and the website is very much usable today.

Every chapter of MEETin is run by a volunteer member from the local to bring people together to meet a new friend in the city. MEETin group also helps people connect to other cities around the world and establish a social network across the MEETin chapter cities around the globe.

Business Week and Washington Post was recognized MEETin.org or MEETin group just recently.

Computer addiction had dominated the techno-exposed minds globally, nowadays. Since the day of its existence, it had prevalently imbibed a vast effect to every individual’s mindset and even character. To be precise, the change in character implies to the very young minds that was at the early age exposed to technology and prone to computer addiction. Children are more vulnerable to becoming a loner, getting easily irritated and nefarious effects due to computer addiction. Today, computer addiction becomes worst since internet games and software were developed and generated that applies to all ages. Facebook had ranked as the top 12 networking worldwide. Its games had drawn time wasters, especially children to the heart of social networking. Farmville, which was created by Zynga, a social networking game company, had more than 63 million of players alone. This rapid gamer increase means more social networking fan and the amendment of the Social networking industry. There is a great hazard for these gamers however, to fall to different fraud and internet scams. Lately, the CNN had reported nefarious anomalies on the internet games.
On the game Farmville, you invest virtual money in order to improve your farm. There are several ways of generating virtual money; by harvesting, by selling, but you can also enjoy additional cash by paying in real cash through paypal, credit card etc. This is a hazardous way of enjoying. Some of the gamers would be up to buying since the better your farm is, the more popular you are to your friends. Monetizing the game is risking your investments even in reality. After all, even the farm does not exist in reality; one should not be hasty of improving what really don’t exist. Sad truth is that children, the most gullible of all are great targets for scam, one click on the internet and the parents would go on wondering why the phone bills and credit cards had a rapid change in reports.
However, it must not be ignored that the internet is very much vulnerable to failure and errors and worst scam. Sir Tim Berners-lee, the creditor of the World Wide Web even pointed out that putting annoying slashes is only made out of whim. It is best to be observed that in one mistake of a symbol of the search engine, could lead to another site which you cannot assure is safe. On another case, on 1988, Robert Morris, a computer science graduate was convicted because of accidentally creating a virus that had resulted into a 600,000 computers unusable. He only intends to test how large the internet is but it had resulted to system and item damages. The hazard that you may provide to the internet may also involve your lifetime investments. The risks is to high to take stakes, you might find a deeper thought of deciding the approaches that may serve you in choosing best way of enjoyment in the internet but one must be very careful in managing internet accounts and social networking luxuries. One cannot imagine by one morning waking up with your credit line empty and phone bills raised.

With microblogging becoming an easy social media tool to communicate people worldwide, a study conducted by a very refutable group showed an increasing trend as more and more travel websites were recorded to have rapid tweets every day.

It showed that at least 52 percent of users are now tweeting from four to 10 times each day. The study also reported government officials, managing directors, hotel owners and commercial directors now understand that using social media tools to promote products and services online is very effective.

The website owners belonging to the travel industry can easily forge connections to their clients worldwide because of the many techniques now using the worldwide web.

In fact, of the 90 twitter users who were included in the study and were personally interviewed by Andy Jarosz – a writer who owns the travel website 501 Places – reported that the twitter hubby has already started six months ago and it became a very addicting
habit.

Jarosz said the online travel community is now using the power of Twitter to communicate with friends, relatives and business associates, as well as to promote their products and services.

The exponential growth of Twitter in 2009, Jarosz said, was seen by the online travel community as a big boost to the travel business all over the world.

Jarosz survey was very reliable as those respondents were the business owners themselves such as overseas suppliers, tour operators in the UK areas, including half of the respondents working in travel business in paid roles.

The survey has also discovered that at least 62 percent of people who traveled internationally, have been traveling thrice or more annually. It also said that 60 percent have been using Twitter to connect with hoteliers, local suppliers and companies involve in travel business. Of this, at least 28.8 percent revealed they made reservations after contacting clients online via Twitter.
Based on conversations made on Twitter, the travel marketers online were able to make good persuasions and closed a travel package.

Understanding your marketing strategies should start first in identifying these 2 channels, the so-called hottest marketing channels in marketing – and these are mobile marketing and social marketing channels.

Mobile marketing – this type of marketing usually focuses in using mobile devices to conduct a massive marketing campaign. The use of cellular phones are usually the best marketing tool you can make, in such a way that you can call all your clients anywhere in world and market your products. There is no limit in mobile marketing, so long as you can make a call or whatever communication mobile to propose or sell your products to prospective customers. Remember that many people are busy and they cannot respond to your marketing strategies such as answering your call or having an appointment, unless you have already set a schedule to the client that you are to meet and discuss business plans and collaborations in person.

Social marketing – This is also another form of marketing channel using various software and social networking websites to create your presence online. The most effective social networking sites today include Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, etc. You will gain clear marketing tools such as developing a good and attractive business page on Facebook. You need to have a good profile in order for you to gain a network of friends, clients and prospects for your product lines. In Facebook, the service is free so that you can now find thousands of business pages created by businessmen and online entrepreneurs.
Social marketing simply means increasing your wide network of friends and future clients so that in the long run you can start marketing certain products you need to promote. There are also techniques to easily capture your target markets.
The power of mobile and social channels in marketing is really amazing. You only need to discover proven and effective techniques used by expert online marketers. Combining these marketing channels will help make a greater market.