A recent E-Marketer story reports that marketers are planning to allocate a major portion of their budgets towards social marketing.

According to the report, respondents to the budgeting questions said that they would devote almost one-fifth of their marketing budgets to social media over the next five years.

The included charts give us a great visual for how marketers are increasing their funding for social media. The chart below shows us how business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketers have allocated their budgets for their products and services.

An interesting stat pointed out in the report is that planned spending on social media has seen a steady increase from only six months ago.

I don’t think that this increase in social media funding is a response to hype or panic. We are too deep into the realm of social networking and at this point, if it were a fad, we would know about it. There are too many companies and marketers out there using it successfully. As the data shows us, as time passes, our budgets should be increasingly dedicated to social media marketing.

The industry’s easement into the social space is easy to see when reviewing E-Marketer’s data. Marketers are still hesitant to dive completely in with their budgets, and I can’t really blame them. I still think social media is in its infancy and I try to be cautious. I refuse to dive into the “next big thing” without researching it and making sure it’s conducive to my marketing strategy.

Sometimes it’s good to read a simple marketing strategy to remind yourself of the basics. Barbara Schenck’s article does exactly that. This is not ground breaking material but stresses the basics we should all be doing. I find it interesting that the basic tactics she mentions can easily be applied to social media as well as our traditional marketing efforts. I will elaborate on this later in the blog.

Schenk makes a couple of great points that can help all of us in our marketing efforts. All of her suggestions tie back to the important practice of research and knowing everything about your potential consumer. In real estate we tend to assume we know our buyer. I think this is dangerous for two reasons: consumers don’t fit into neat little demographic packages anymore and the consumer is changing at a fast rate.

She talks about identifying the geography, demographics, and psycho graphics of potential consumers. I think we all understand that in order to develop and sell a product successfully, we have to understand the values of who we are selling to.

So Why Am I Sharing This With You?

Well, I am sharing this with you to demonstrate that social media isn’t really all that different than what we have done before. Message development and follow up is what is different, but the disciplines of locating and researching our consumers are still very necessary. In fact, social media has made these disciplines easier.

Schenk talks about profiling our potential consumers, but guess what? They have done the work for us. Most social media profiles across the social networks contain profiles where a lot of users identify their age, location, relationship status, and career or education.

As far as psycho graphics go, social media can really help you in your research. People talk about what they like and don’t like. They talk about what they believe in and what they like to do. Social media is a gold mine for voluntary consumer data for you to collect.

I hope you can make the same connections I did after reading Schenk’s article. Even though it seems basic, sometimes we need to take a step back and try not to get caught up in the new hot marketing tool. Even though the way we market to consumers is changing, some of the techniques to do so will still be necessary.

Susan Sweeney, social media guru, has written a great article explaining the benefits of social media in relation to SEO.

All of the acronyms and rankings can be confusing, but Sweeney does a great job of giving a clear and concise explanation of how social media and SEO can work together.

You can read her article here.

After reading Sweeney’s post, I have my own take on the subject.  Networking with social media does extremely well in relation to SEO and the building of a positive on-line presence.

It Creates A Natural Network

I like to think of social media as a way to create an on-line network that would serve the same purpose as traditional work networks.  One of the greatest things about social media is that allows us to easily connect with others in our work fields.  This is the big pay off.  Social media has allowed us to syndicate the process of finding industry peers and authorities.  It’s like networking on steroids.

I think that once these trusting relationships have been formed with either colleagues or consumers, links are then shared to sites that are actually relevant to the subject matter.  As Sweeney mentioned, relevance is important.  She calls this natural link building.  I look at it as if a colleague decides to pass my business card along to someone they meet.  It’s the same thing, but with a link to your blog or website.  It might even be your Facebook or Twitter page.

Sweeney also talks about the debate of whether or not links inside of social networks are valued by search engines.  Google displays the latest on a given search query so it’s hard to deny that there is some value.

My point is that while SEO is an important aspect to your on-line marketing strategy, social media can provide a ton of high-quality traffic if done correctly.  Plus, those good relationships you form from networking will lead to solid links to your site, which I can guarantee you will help your search engine ranking.

A big part of developing a social media strategy involves understanding the target audience you’re are trying to communicate with.

Professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski of Harvard University has developed one of the most thought provoking hypothesis on why social network users behave the way they do. I recommend reading about his studies, which you can do so here

According to Piskorski, social networks are the most useful when they address the failures of off line networks. I think of social networks as a complimentary system for our off line networks.

What makes social networks appealing and useful is their syndication. Piskorski addresses this clearly. By utilizing social networks, we are able to reach relevant people faster and in larger quantities. This is the major benefit of social networking to me. Being able to reach peers, industry leaders, and consumers has become easier through social networks.

The most interesting excerpt from the article is where Piskorki gives the analogy of a group of friends sitting around a table talking. An advertiser, that no one at the tables knows, sits down and starts talking about a product that none of the friends have an interest in. How do you think that sales pitch is going to go?

We shouldn’t treat our social network interactions with consumers any differently than we would treat our face-to-face interactions.

This is the hard part for marketers and businesses. It is our natural inclination to want social media to act like traditional media. We want a one-way message to do the trick, but it will never work. Even though we understand the necessity for communication in social media, we often don’t take the time to craft a message that invites a conversation. We need to make sure that our social strategies make sense to who we are trying to communicate with. They should understand our product and why we are talking to them. If they don’t become engaged, then we have wasted both our time and our money.