Social media will become one of the most preferred marketing medium in 2012. Real time communication is the biggest advantage of social media, so the marketers have to change their mind-set accordingly.

Marketing Trend in 2012 will be focused on business branding and customer service. Most of the companies will involve with the inbound marketing which involves Social Media Marketing as a major part, and other options like email generation, content creation, call to action, SEO, etc.

Social media sites like Facebook and Youtube are integrating new tools for measuring the social media effectiveness. So, in the coming years, the measuring the social media effectiveness will be an easy and undeniable task.

Data based on the social media sites will play a big role in defining marketing strategies. Companies will have to categorize their marketing plans according to the collected data, it may vary from location, age, sex, likes, messages, etc. Marketing plan would be more effective when the relevant data is collected and sorted out. Marketing agencies will convert this available data into actionable and more profitable marketing plans.

We are witnessing increase in the use of social media in mobile/smart phones which will continue. Therefore, there will be activiites/conversations done than using computing devices. Combination of social media in smart phones enables the companies to go for a real-time interaction with their customers.

Location based services will gain more popularity and usage due to the increased access of social sites through mobile phones. Location based sites have a lesser use and advantage for businesses now. Though this is gradually increasing and will promptly increase in 2012.

More availability of API key from social media sites enable developers to develop more and more applications for their clients. This will result in more number of applications developed for social sites.

Social Media Gaming will gather more momentum than ever.

Integration of traditional marketing with social, mobile and digital marketing will be a challenging task for marketers. Overcoming the clutter in social media and targeting/connecting with the right people, who is interested in your products and services, will become crucial for the companies.

In conventional marketing, it gets a lot of time for planning and execution but in social media immediate response is required to the customers/prospects as well as same time to deal with the negative feed back (And need to react instantly).

Also since there are more things can be predicted, this post is open for your comments/predictions.

We shall discus later on how to face these changes as a business, so stay tuned to our blog.