Social Media Challenges for Businesses in 2012 by sagarganatra

2012 is sneaking up on us. It’s amazing how quickly a year goes, isn’t it? If you are in the content marketing space with your business or brand, you’ve probably had a year overwhelmed with information and engagement. That’s a good thing, right? We want to have more people communicating and networking with us than we can handle.

The days of questioning if engaging in social media is a viable or responsible advertising strategy are behind us. The questions and concerns moving forward are about how to optimize engagement and create strategy.

In this post I want to focus on how social changed the engagement landscape this year, and how to keep up in 2012. In a follow-up post, we’ll focus more on content marketing challenges and goals for the next year.

Keeping Up With Social
Just a year ago today, content marketers were spending much of their time in two social networks: Facebook and Twitter. Just one year later, companies are commonly utilizing five or six or more social networks to maximize their reach to prospects. Two stood out particularly in 2011:

Linkedin

The social network for professionals went public in May of 2011 with an initial offering of near $9 billion. In a quarterly earnings statement last month, Linkedin announced they had experienced over 60% user growth in 2011, now totaling somewhere around 135 million users worldwide.
Whereas Linkedin was once thought of as strictly a social network for resume posting and browsing, companies are now making use of Linkedin in a variety of new ways:

• Job listings
• Professional meet-up groups and clubs
• Personal social networking
• Content sharing
• Fundraising
• Authority Building w/Clients/Customer Support
• Market Research

Google+

Google+ is an interesting atmosphere for a business. Launched in June of this year, they rolled out a product that was available just for personal use initially. Finally in late October, it was announced Google+ would support Google Apps accounts and brand pages. The service now has nearly 50 million users in its 6 months.
There are many in the content marketing space that consider Google+ the only serious rival to Facebook’s social authority.
Why do some consider Google+ the superior product?
Better sharing

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  • EdgeRank, the algorithm Facebook uses for sharing, will only show your shared content to a certain portion of your followers and connections, based on their requirements. Google+ shows all of your shared content to all of your connections.

Partitioning Connections

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  • Google Circles makes it easy and simple to group your connections based on interest or relationships, and sharing and posting content to those circles is done with one click. Many feel this system is more intuitive and easy to use than Facebook Groups.

They Are Google

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  • Authority really matters. Google is one of the largest companies in the world with unlimited resources. They will put as much as needed in to their social network, and will have teams of their developers and marketers making fixes and improvements by the minute.

Other social networks really made an impact in 2011 too:

• Tumblr
• Pinterest
• YouTube (More companies now using YouTube for content)
• SlideShare
• Many more…

With the leaps Linkedin took in 2011 and the unveiling of Google+, who knows what 2012 has to offer? Explore these new and growing networks in 2012 to see if there are opportunities for engagement and business. Don’t let “too much social” become a blind spot for your business.