It is easy to feel nostalgic. There are countless times when I had almost hit that send button sending out a message to doubter companies (these are the past companies I’ve made a pitch to about integrating social media) saying, “I told you so”. Nevertheless, since that is not ethical (and it’s rude) I’m glad that I was able to hold myself back.

From the same research comes even more showings that are striking. One of which describes how people are now using their smartphones to access social media content in 2012. It is now up to 63% of all people surveyed to be exact. The last time I checked early last year for that figure is that its share is only 30%. That jump is more than double the precious standing! These studies, which solidifies social media’s influence to the consumers, also offers a hefty fine for all companies that is late to consider social media in the past.

Another key component that was made concrete by the study is the affinity of people with pictures. Yes I know it sounds so simple, but not all of us embed images in our ever tweet, update or blog post don’t we? Pictures came out on top of the lists of what people want to see on our content as marketers and businesses. 40% of them said that a picture makes a difference whether they would engage a brand more or not.

This comes not with too much surprise. If we are to take a look at the top 100 social media companies, over half of them, 54% to be exact can be seen on Instagram. Because of this move, companies like Nike, Starbucks, and GE (which have all embraced social media) have again proven that they are ahead of the curve. Look it up and Instagram is all over the news recently because of the trend that’s shifting people towards images. The same can be said with Pinterest. Facebook’s one billion acquisition does make sense after all. Instagram’s growth rate is showing it since it has jumped 35%. Compared with the performance of Google+, which is just at a measly 5%.

We are now at a crossroad once again. This is the same scenario companies found themselves just 5% short years ago when social media was still at its infancy. I think whoever finds the right track first gets a chance to be a leader.

Having said all that, we can agree that social media is like an avalanche that will continue to ravage all those that do not pay enough attention to it. That is why there is so much fuss about it in the business world. Today I’m going to list the top benefits of social media on businesses.

Increase brand visibility

A huge chunk of the world’s population is already spending incredulous time on social media sites. Not only that but they seem to respond more to advertisements more than they do when they’re looking at an ad on a TV. This makes social media the new weapon of choice of businesses and their advertising firms which handles their brand. They engage in social media with the hopes of improving brand retention, build loyalty and overall generate more sales; and all those points are being hit as of the moment through social media.

A powerful tool for market research

Even before there was technology to assist them, corporations were already spending serious amounts of dollars to have a glimpse of what their brand, products and services looks from the outside. I’m talking about learning from the opinions of their customers and aligning their products and services to meet demands or to fix shortcomings.

Quick and cheap mode of customer service

A growing trend recently is to use social media to not just get a message across one way towards the audience but to communicate. Communication between a business and its customers is more popularly known as customer service. Guess what, social media has proven to me as effective for that purpose as well minus the price tag.

Great for business networking

More often than not our conversations about social media revolve around how it’s so effective on improving the relationship between a business and its customers. What we don’t see though on the background is that businesses use it to build relationships with other businesses too. Business to business of B2B social media is just as widespread as it is on the other side of the coin. It’s just not as visible but it is certainly as important.

Traffic generating

The most literal benefit I’ll include on the list is social media’s ability to drive traffic to a website you want traffic to go – in this case a business website. Sharing content spurs interactions with friends, friends of friends and strangers, attracting traffic wherever you want it to be directed.

The generation of today’s consumers is elusive. No longer can a strong marketing campaign wield the attention of many, in fact there are businesses that have completely discarded of that approach. It is impossible to launch a campaign in today’s commerce wherein a company’s goal is to influence the entire population. Under any media, gone are the days of broadcast with the entire population’s opinion in mind. Keeping those same sets of principle that may have somehow worked in the past will now lose a business more money than it will draw in.

At the present, the strategy is to specialize and target a particular audience. We may know of this term as a business’ target market. Any marketing campaign that will come of a company’s gate needs to be funneled to entertain, grab the attention and sway the opinion of a certain target market they have long poured research into. In fact, success relies not only on the effectiveness of a marketing campaign towards particular demographics but also the consistency of the entire organization towards what their target market expects from them. A company’s values, goals, products, services and marketing all needs to coincide with the the public profile they want to convey. And only when they’ve reached a harmony acceptable to the consumers or exceed the competition will they reap the profits delivered from their target market. Any other profit that came from other areas are extra that serves as garnish to what is going to be an impressive meal.

So how does social media fit in this picture? Social media is indeed the growing platform of choice when it comes to today’s marketing industry? The social media benefits are too many to be left untapped by a business of any scale. Whether we are talking about a huge corporation or a small entrepreneur, there is room for social media to work its magic and improve the visibility of the brand in the eyes of its target market. I have firsthand experience on how social media benefits works for a brand. Whenever there are clients who are about to cut cost on their marketing campaign but are still eyeing to acquire new business if possible are the best prospects to approach because you are able to do both with social media. Usually theses are small businesses that are hesitant in spending but a social media marketing firm can use that to their advantage.

Businesses most of the time already have the profiles set in place. The only problem really is that their use of the platforms is lethargic. Getting help from someone or a firm who’s got the background and experience to inject real people engagement from social media should be able to draw in more business while requiring fewer resources to accomplish it. The same cannot be said with traditional media.

The challenge is to not just to overtake people from the U.S. or Europe anymore. The internet has begun the phase of real globalization as all countries around the world are now starting to upload significant number of websites on their own. And that is why the competition has increased several notches up.

As we are now looking at the landscape being already extremely crowded and competitive, you probably landed on this page because you are looking for social media guidelines. Surely with all the complexities now involved at how to effectively attract whichever visitors are left wondering out there, it would be nice to have something that could point a newbie to the right direction.

Here are some tips on how you can be part of the great social media revolution:

Make sure to have your main business website represented in social networking sites with its own business profile. In general people define social media as a website which have content that they can easily share the content to their friends, relatives and contacts. The best way to do this is to have widgets attached on your sites from social networking sites which mean you’ve got to sign up your business separate to your personal profile.

Make your posts as interesting as possible and make sure each posts finds its way on all your social networking timelines. It doesn’t matter much if you’ve got great content unless your business has got the audience to tell it to. A full social media site is always connected through different social streams making their content super accessible. Also letting social networking sites carry your content makes it a possibility that it will turn viral.

Abide to social media etiquettes. It is very easy to overdo things in social media. People want to get updated but not to the point that what you’ll present them would topple some of the other feeds they are waiting for as well. Be helpful and stay clear of being a spammer. It will do more harm than good.

Make sure your profile is up to date. You want to make sure that your social networking sites and profiles are updated. You want to get back at the links you’ve posted through the past and update the ones that are no longer working. It is very easy to tick visitors with non-working links. Since user experience is kept at such a high standard in social media, this pointer cannot be missed.

I sometimes stumble across this thought because it pains me that as an internet marketer, at least I get something out of being engaged in social media and they don’t. Then there are days when I feel that there’s a lot more people better at my job than I do. I’m sure there are other interne marketers out there that feel the same I do. It’s actually funny the way I cringe when I see an individual on my friends list, circles and followings that has more online authority than I do. They’ve got more presence than I do because they certainly do a lot more interacting to other people that I can ever accomplish with my day. Now to defend myself, investing time on social media marketing is far from being the only task of an internet marketer. My day gets spread out towards building back links, creating content for websites, writing blogs posts and managing comments on the sites I’m maintaining. Having said that, I hope you see (for those non-internet marketers reading) that the mistake of spreading your efforts too thin becomes increasingly common as the number of marketing channels multiply as well. That is one clear advantage of those people solely dedicating their day on propagating nonprofit thoughts in social media.

Establishing a social media brand requires a lot of the same actions people wasting away their personal time on Facebook and Twitter does. To catch up, people like me who am doing this as a profession use website tools that provides the service of automating much of the stuff that needs to be done on these separate platforms. The race has begun between programmers, developers and service providers of these websites to present professional the best possible tool to help them with their daily struggles. I’ve recently come across one such tool. It’s called “IFTTT”. Apparently it stands for “if this then that”. I have yet to master all of the capabilities of this website which requires a visitor to sign up and become a user.

I’m sure you’ve used email clients and if you’re familiar with its rules and triggers functionality, the tool I’m telling you about basically works the same way. This new development is another tool that needs to be challenged if someone like me is to move forward. As you can see, the stage where we are in, like sand – is ever shifting.

The corporate community in fact at one point is not only unaware of what their missing on the potential of social media but they are clearly appalled by it as well. Boatloads of company money are being wasted each day from the loss of productivity of employers. Guess what is stealing their workforce’s time? If you guessed its social media, then you are correct. The loss of productivity because employees have decided to spend an average of about an hour unto social media off of their working hours have left a bad taste on the mouths of business owners. To combat these; companies conducted studies, hired new personnel and made organization wide rule changes which certainly took time, money and brain power which should have been otherwise used for profit making. These terrible experience have forced them to conclude that social media is no place for business and vice versa.

Then all it took were a few companies bold enough to go against the flow and create disturbance. These are the so called “early adopters” which took the leap of faith that started the avalanche of businesses that are now trying to catch up. Today companies of all industry and sizes are now forcing their way on the previous empty competition of social media. Because of the success those early adopters have gained, other companies simply took notice and realized the gains are enough to leave their terrible experience with social media behind. Social media is now the platform to be reckoned with primarily because of how much the world population has shifted to the internet.

As technology continues to improve and provide us with faster internet, cheaper computers, computers that we can carry anywhere we go and more free online services; social media has yet to reach its full potential. It will continue to capture all of us and lure us into sinking more time on it. Also it is safe to safe that the future generation would automatically develop a dependency on it just by looking at how the young generation responds to social media today.

There was one thing that struck me the most during that span of time of the interview, it was the first time I ever heard anyone mention the word “apps” to pertain to programs. It came out of the mouth of Steve Jobs and he was the first guy I can remember ever saying that word instead of saying the regular word we all know to be “programs”. It is quite obvious how much of a visionary Mr. Jobs was. I know now why he has spearheaded so much of the technological advancements that we have in our pockets, in our home and in our hands right now. I am awestruck as well by how far his vision was when it came on the field of social media and how it would be in the mainstream not too far from when they were interviewed. And as we all know it has reached the point of mainstream now in 2012. They’ve talked for more than an hour about what an exciting time it is to be alive in this day and age. As this decade would certainly go down on the history books being the time when so much was put at stake by so many entrepreneurs trying to carve out each of his name into history.

In case you haven’t noticed, the explosion of social media services is still happening all around us as we speak. This boom gave birth to programs for us to manipulate the many streams available to us at any time. A program such as the social media application tones down the chaos into something more useful and malleable. It helps us contain all these social media platforms so we’d be able to turn our efforts into profits or whatever it is we want a large audience to be aware of. These applications sure differ with their features, their layouts and their reach but they were all created to do one thing; to make social media more accessible for people from the most tech savvy to the average Joe.

Today, people are no longer having breakfast like that. It doesn’t matter what social class a man belongs to, everybody just switched over to the news feed they get from the countless sources they get on the internet. Social media have pushed traditional media such as print into the brink of extinction. With the current grasp social media now has on the population of the world, people who makes a living out of traditional media now has to be extra creative just to stay relevant.

There is no doubt though that we still need them. Journalist, editors, and artist in fact everyone involved in traditional media in the past have a place in social media today just as long as they can adapt to the technology and level of engagement this new form of media requires.

For a while now I’ve been a user of Google reader. It is a platform that draws contents out of a web destination and posts it with all the other online publication I am subscribed on. If you still have not clue on what Google reader is, you should spend a few minutes of your time and setup your own feed page. It will introduce to you a whole new level of productivity. Having said all that, I’m wondering how these publications I am subscribed in still find value in me reading their posts? I’m not even going into their site anymore. What reason would they still have once all of the world’s population have switched on getting their contents this way where everything is being delivered in bits that they want?

With this question in mind, I set out to find some social media examples of how traditional media can still get a foothold on the current landscape we all are in.

• Artist Greg Burney sure made a nice start when he decided to bulk up his Twitter followers. He promised to draw a sketch of the first 3000 followers that will come and followers he did have soon after.
• Wall Street Journal Utilizes foursquare to help direct people to shelters during a hurricane back in 2011. Look up the story and be inspired of their creativity.
• Reuters used Storify to cover a riot in in London.
• New York Timesreporter crow-sourcing news from Twitter – look up this story and you’ll see how the trend of using Twitter to gather news started.
• A columnist for New York Times uses Facebook to report a story from Egypt.

Above are actual scenarios how traditional media personal made good use of social media to stay relevant.

A social media template is what it takes to align all the metrics one could get from social media and transform them into organized information any company employee can use. Sure an internet marketer can go through the routine of hundreds of pages he needs to maintain a day, but even he can get lost now and then. And how would his superiors monitor his performance and gauge how his social media marketing techniques are doing, would they need to spend the whole day trying to interpret those raw pages as well?

What are social media templates exactly?

You know, it’s that list which contains step by step directions on how to go about your company’s social media marketing plan. Also it has cues or hints to point a company on the right direction on what to pursue on its internet marketing efforts.

What information should it contain?

• Action plans
• Business goals
• Customer listening form
• Social media trends
• Amount of interaction through each social media platform
• Industry trends
• Competitor’s online activities
• Keywords to cultivate
• And a lot more…

If you think that this template is important, you’re right. In fact it is vital no matter how small or large the company is. As long as they have decided to spend a couple of hours a day to get into social media marketing, they wouldn’t want their efforts to go to waste that’s why they have to utilize a template.

In this day and age where people can create content and upload them on the internet just as easy as drinking coffee in the morning; publishing great content is simply not good enough anymore. First it has to be impressive and worthy to be mentioned linked upon many times over. But sadly after that impressive content is still not good enough to generate income for decent living.

In order to get your return of investment you have to share it, promote it and market it. Also you have to include social media the rest of the way. It is where the gurus, newbies and people in general are located on the internet. And you know it as I know it, it doesn’t matter how good your content is if no one knows about it. It won’t be able to generate anything. You cannot just sit there and let time passes by until your content becomes irrelevant. You have to learn the ropes of marketing no matter how confusing it may be. Soon enough, you will find yourself filling data into a template to organize your thoughts. And we know what comes after that part – success.

However, with the rise of social media and more particularly social networking sites; companies now have a new choice. This is more beneficial to small businesses because this meant that they no longer have to give up a significant amount of investment for the high premium traditional media would usually charge companies that want to advertise with them. The emergence of Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, Pinterest, LinkedIn and YouTube taught all industries to update, tweet, write articles, posts videos and photos all for the sake of being relevant in the world of social media. And with this growth of demand, surely you know what it means less you are fond of sitting all day long. Companies are looking for people who can guide them through the rumblings of social media websites, networks and contents.

Job hunting can be a tedious task and can be sorrowful if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you are still doing it by foot, then it will be difficult to see and end for your sorrows. Most applicants of this age do their job hunting tasks online, where you stay at home and prevent the sweat. Companies are inclined with this method as well because they are assured that their potential employee currently employing online is at least computer literate. Remember, it’s easier to sort a large number of emails than a big pile of paper.

Now if you’re someone who is more than computer literate and can hold your own with some marketing gurus in social media then companies more than want you. In fact a business owner is probably dreaming about a guy who has your skills right this very moment!

Let’s take a look at some of the social media career up for grabs:

• Social media planner
• Community moderator
• Blogger
• Social media marketing specialist
• Search engine optimization specialist
• Email handling
• Online customer service representative
• Copy writer
• Blog/Forum commenter

Although most are still not familiar with some of these jobs because they are newly carved out of the demand created by the social media boom, one can rest assured that a career can be made of it. All are related and works in harmony and relies in each other to achieve success. It will only depend on how much resource a company is willing to put into its social media efforts if it will just take a pick on some of the jobs above or employ a whole team which covers all of them.