3 social trends your business must know for 2011 planning

Here are three of the webinar’s trends to expect in 2011. Is your business ready to capitalize on these in 2011?

1. Facebook as a meaningful marketing tool.

An Experian study found that nearly one in five consumers search their social networks for information before making a purchase, up 17% from a year ago. Expect that number to grow in 2011. Marketers obviously recognize the need to reach potential customers on social networks like Facebook – it’s smart to want to fish where the fish are. But Facebook users are adverse to advertising – 96% have never clicked an ad on Facebook – and empowered to ignore it – users can choose which brands to follow. Therefore, meaningful marketing on Facebook means earning users’ engagement.

2. The convergence of social and search.

User-generated content (UGC) can have a huge positive impact on SEO. The webinar highlighted a few reasons for this.

• Freshness. UGC is a stream of continuously updated content. Allowing users to submit UGC on your site effectively crowdsources content updating, providing a scalable way to keep pages fresh.
• Volume. UGC usually outnumbers “traditional” marketing content by 20 to 1. In fact, SES magazine reported in 2009 that 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands were links to UGC.
• Relevance. UGC is written in the customer’s words, which is more likely to match a search query from another customer. Google reported in May 2010 that 54.5% of queries are greater than three words, and 70% have no exact matched keywords. UGC helps capture long tail searches, as well as common colloquialisms and misspellings, by using the same words customers are searching for.

3. Mobile empowerment.

Each recent year has been (prematurely) anointed the “year of mobile.” 2011 may not be the year mobile shopping takes over, but mobile will definitely play a much bigger role in our average purchases than ever before. Glen Senk, CEO of URBN (the umbrella company behind our clients Urban Outfitters and Free People), predicts that mobile online research while in-store shopping will soon become the norm in retail.

The ubiquity of mobile research and shopping is certainly on the rise – one in five cell phones sold today is a smart phone. Mobile will allow businesses to un-silo their channels in 2011, making all of their online information available in-store. Smart businesses have already started. Our clients Best Buy, Sephora, and Golfsmith, among others, include customer rating and review content in mobile apps, allowing customers to check reviews while in-store to better inform purchases.

Innovations in mobile like QR code and barcode scanning make apps like these work harder, finding relevant details for exact in-store products without requiring customers to search. Our client Debenhams used RedLaser’s open SDK to add a barcode scanning feature to their iPhone app. Customers can scan product tags to instantly view product details, read customer reviews, and add items to their wish lists.
~BazaarBlog.com~

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