Social media marketing has been around for many years and according to marketing leaders, it will continue to grow in 2012. As social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, gain even more of a following, it is important for marketers to understand the ever changing social networks and how they can be made useful for B2B.

So, how can we expect social media marketing  to change in 2012?

- Content Creation: B2B marketers are realizing the importance of content, so there will be a strong emphasis on content creation. It will continue to grow rapidly and spread to different marketing platforms such as Google+, LinkedIn, and Blogs. Google rewards companies that are creating new content by factoring this into a higher search ranking.

- New Marketing Platforms: Google+ was the largest social media based marketing platform to come out of 2011, but as we enter 2012 we wonder what’s next? Niche social media sites such as Pinterest and Push are now being used for business. Look for more of these platforms in 2012.

- Facebook Timeline: Facebook timeline will be rolling out to businesses soon and similar to Twitter feeds, the Facebook timeline will update constantly. Therefore, in order to stay relevant, marketers will need to post more often.

- Cross-Platform Linking: With so many different social sites and media platforms popping up it’s important to stay relevant in each community. 2012 will bring the increase in social media buttons and linking from platform to platform. Cross linking will bring fans of your Facebook page to your Twitter feed, so it’s important to have different and fresh content on each platform!

Yesterday, Google shook up the World Wide Web when it announced that current CEO Eric Schmidt would be stepping down on April 4th to be replaced by co-founder Larry Page. Many were all a-”twitter” about the news:

@CNNMoney: “Eric Schmidt is stepping down as Google CEO, with cofounder Larry Page taking over on April 4. $$”

@PourMeCoffee: “Larry Page has just ousted Eric Schmidt as Mayor of Google on @foursquare.”

The reactions seemed split between surprise and “its about time.”  First gaining the position in 2001, Schmidt was originally seen as more of a mature voice in a company started by twenty-somethings.  As he even stated on Twitter today “Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!”  Schmidt will continue to participate as one of Google’s board members.

How will this change Google?

In the near future… probably not much.  Although the tech community is humming with talks about privacy, mobile technology, and participation in social media, Google will not change overnight.  The internet giant will be given a fresh perspective through the leadership of Page.  One market that may be getting a boost is Green Energy, as Page has had a long history of support for the movement.

Whatever Page has up his sleeve, I’m sure the internet will be all abuzz.

Several years ago I can recall when search engines lacked the ability to provide us with good quality results, but that has certainly changed. During the past few years search engines have dramatically enhanced their search capabilities, accuracy, speed and functionality. The top three search engines to date are Google, Yahoo and Bing (previously known as MSN/Live) which serve millions of searches every month on an unlimited number of subjects.

As a website or business owner, it’s in your best interest to carefully target your website with keywords that will help get you ranked high on these (and other) search engines. But how do you do this without the expertise? It can be somewhat time consuming but a modest attempt can do enough to make a difference in your search engine ranking.

To help you, I’d like to stress the following key points:

• Break down your website so you have each page targeting up to 3 related keywords. For example, if you have a page that is selling writing services, you can target copy writing, copy editing and website copy.
• In the website code, your ‘keywords’ meta data should list the same keywords you are targeting in your page. In the above example, copy writing, copy editing and website copy would be the keywords. There is no need to use more than 5 keywords here.
• Try to use the keywords (at LEAST one of them) in the <title> of the page. Again, this would be in the code as well.
• The meta description should use the keywords, all of them if possible. The keywords will show up as bold text in the results when someone does a search.
• Use internal links (to other pages on YOUR website) to related content/pages.

Those are basic necessities to using your website keywords properly for SEO purposes. You should also do some simple research to find out who your competition is for the keywords. Simply go to the three above listed search engines and perform searches for the keywords you want to target. You can see what they do on their website which may be helping to keep their rankings high. Additionally, you must realize that your website will not have an immediate effect to searches so give it a week or two to get indexed.

Update: Please read this update regarding choosing meta keywords