Are you using social media to generate leads? If not, you could be missing out on a lot of business. Webmarketing123’s “2011 State of Digital Marketing Report,” based on an online survey of 500 marketing professionals in the U.S., suggests that social media leads are becoming more and more important in generating new business.

Larry Bodine discusses some of the report’s findings in 55% of Marketers Have Closed Deals From Social Media Leads.

The title of his post alone is enough to give pause: 55 percent. In other words, more than half of marketers closed deals due to a social media lead. That’s astonishing, particularly considering how recently social media was a novelty, not a real business tool.

Across the three major social media platforms—Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter—68.4 percent of marketers have generated at least one lead from at least one site.

Facebook appears to provide the best chance of success:

• 47 percent of marketers have generated a lead from Facebook
• 40.7 percent of marketers closed a deal from one of those leads

So a significant percentage of the marketers who generated a lead on Facebook were able to close the deal.

LinkedIn and Twitter were about even in terms of lead-generating ability, at 34.8 percent and 33.8% percent respectively. And about 20 percent of marketers closed deals from LinkedIn or Twitter leads.

If you’re running digital marketing campaigns with the goal of generating leads, which is the most common reason for these campaigns, social media needs to be part of your mix. If you are already using social media, you might want to consider expanding your presence there. Social media is clearly here to stay, and signs point to continued growth for lead generation and sales activities.

Information in this post gathered in association with an atlanta bankruptcy attorney.

SEO isn’t just for your website anymore. It’s for your entire web presence, and social channels are becoming ever more important to that presence. One great option for boosting your SEO is having your own YouTube Channel.

As Mitchell Harper points out in “HOW TO: Boost Your SEO with a YouTube Channel,” properly tagged videos can appear in organic search results for your target keywords, increasing your visibility. He also provides four steps for getting started.

Step 1: Choosing topics: Be careful here. You want to educate your viewers, not show them a commercial. Instead of talking directly about your service, teach your viewers about related topics. For example, a lawyer specializing in real estate law could discuss homeowners’ rights during foreclosure proceedings.

Step 2: Recording videos: Professional quality isn’t necessary; use a decent video camera and simple editing software. Write a brief outline of up to 10 points to cover. Include brief promos for your business at the beginning and end, along with a link to your website. Your final video should be no more than 2 minutes.

Step 3: Optimize for SEO: Put your target keywords in the following places:

• Title: Use target keywords twice. For example, “Home foreclosure: Your rights during home foreclosure proceedings.”
• Description: Start with a link to your website and then write a keyword-rich description.
• Tags: Use your main keyword and variants.

Step 4: Build viewership: Get links back to your video by:

• Sharing it on other social media sites.
• Asking for links from people linking to other popular videos within your category.
• Posting your video as a “video reply” to a related one. You can only do this once for any given video, so find the most relevant place for each.

Over time, your YouTube Channel will become a valuable resource that will boost your SEO as well as educate your audience.

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Creating social connections is becoming more and more important to SEO efforts. Social media sites were once a novelty with no obvious use. Today they can provide significant SEO benefits, and a good example involves building links with Twitter.

In Casey Henry’s recent post, “Yes, You Really Can Build Links With Twitter – Whiteboard Friday” SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin presents eight tactics for you to try. Here are five that can provide quality links quickly.

Offer to help:

When someone tweets about a problem you know you can help with, offer to do so. Do it well and for free, and most people will tweet about it and link to you.

Create story summaries:

Stories on social media sites tend to be fragmented and get lost as time passes and the posts are mixed with other stories. Curate them, create a cohesive story and then tweet about it, with a link to your summary. Summify is a good tool to help with this.

Give link suggestions:

If someone has written a post that misses some point that you’ve covered, suggest that he or she add that information, and provide a link to your post. This works best when you already have a relationship with the person.

Answer queries:

When you see the same question popping up repeatedly on social media sites, create content that covers the topic thoroughly and then point askers to it.

Offer testimonials:

If you’ve written a blog post praising someone’s product or service, tweet or direct message the person with a link to it and an offer of a testimonial to use on his or her website.
Check out Rand’s video for his other tips, as well as additional ideas on how to accomplish all of his tactics. Try at least one and see how it works for you.

Information in this post gathered in association with a New York injury attorney.

Have you been leery of using Facebook for business, afraid that potential clients or employers might see some posts you’d rather they didn’t? Or worse, photographic evidence of past indiscretions in which an old friend posted and tagged you? Facebook recently revamped its share options to make it simple to segregate what is seen by family, friends and those all-important business contacts.

Information in this post gathered in association with an Oregon auto accident attorney.

As Stephen Fairley explains in “Social Media Marketing for Attorneys: Facebook Revamps Share Options,” you can now:

• Easily control who sees your post: Right next to the post button is a little icon that lets you choose Public, Friends or Custom. In custom, you can choose Friends of Friends, Only Me or Specific People. Specific People can include groups, if you’ve created those. You can also choose to hide the post from specific people or groups. Even better, you can now change who sees an update after you’ve posted it.
• Manage tags: If you’d rather not be tagged in photos, you can turn on a couple of options under your privacy settings. Profile Review allows you to review friends’ tags of you before they appear on your profile, and Tag Review alerts you when friends want to add tags to your posts. You can also control who sees posts you’ve been tagged in after they appear on your profile.
• Set a custom default privacy: If there are people you’d rather not share most posts with, set this so you don’t have to customize every update before posting it.

It was possible to control who saw your posts before, but the option was hidden in your settings page, and you couldn’t change who saw them after posting. Now, with Facebook’s revamped share options, more people should be comfortable connecting with a wider variety of people.

Social media is all about sharing, and the ability to share across sites (such as posting your tweets to Facebook and LinkedIn by including a simple tag) is especially useful, not to mention time-saving. Now that Google+ is here, users need a simple way to share it with Twitter and Facebook, too.

Information in this post gathered in association with a Delaware auto accident attorney

Unfortunately, there’s no official way to do this, but there are some browser extensions that can help. Greg Finn discusses two of them in “How to Post Your Google+ Feed to Facebook and Twitter.”

Publish Sync

This extension is currently only available for Chrome. It allows you to link not only Google+, Facebook and Twitter, but also LinkedIn, Digg and a few other networks. Once you’ve linked your networks, it will show up under your updates box, so you can choose where to share.

It also lets you choose to share selectively. The sharing options that are available within a service, like Google+ circles, are also available when sharing from another service.

SGPlus

This extension works in Firefox and Safari, as well as Chrome, but only from within Google+. While in Google+, you can:

• See your Facebook and Twitter streams
• Let Google+ automatically post your updates to Facebook and Twitter
• “Like,” retweet and comment in Facebook and Twitter without ever leaving Google+
• Access Gmail

This means you only need to keep one tab open to manage three social accounts plus Gmail. You can also import Facebook photos directly into Google+.

These tools are certainly useful and can save a lot of time, but as Finn points out, they do require access to all your social networks to work. If you’re concerned about privacy, they may not be for you.

If you’ve been using (or trying to use) Twitter to promote your business, you know how easily it can eat up large chunks of your day. One way to save time and still build a strong Twitter presence is to use a Twitter client to manage and schedule your tweets. This way, you can spend an hour or less on Twitter while still appearing engaged.

Information in this post gathered in association with a Mesa Attorney

Michael Gray explains in “How to Be Involved on Twitter in Less Than an Hour a Day” how he uses the HootSuite™ Social Media Dashboard to engage people who live in or frequently travel to a particular city. His method involves strategic use of lists to avoid information overload.

Twitter lets you create lists, but HootSuite gives you additional tools that make it easier to use your lists. In Gray’s example, he created 10 lists related to living or traveling in the city he was promoting, including things like hotels, restaurants, official municipal accounts, and news.

By scanning his lists, he can easily find information on upcoming events and other relevant information. Combining this information with Google Alerts™ and a local calendar of events allows him to schedule tweets up to a few weeks in advance to talk up those events.

You can use a similar strategy to organize your Twitter streams and related information. You might prefer a different Twitter client, like TweetDeck, for example, but as long as it allows you to organize and scan a variety of lists and schedule tweets in advance, you can replicate this method.

According to Gray, unless you’re running a special event, it only takes 15 to 20 minutes, two or three times a day (in other words, an hour a day or less), to build your Twitter presence.

An active Facebook business page is a fantastic way to grow your brand and connect with current and future customers. But to determine if your marketing efforts are working, you need analytics, just like on your website. That’s where Facebook Insights® can help.

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Facebook Insights offers great data that lets you see which Facebook marketing efforts are producing the best results. Kaila Strong discusses some of the most important data points in “Facebook Insights: 6 Areas You Need to Monitor for Effective Messaging” (found under the Interactions section of the link).

Impressions and feedback trends: Look for patterns in areas like type of content or the time of day that people are more (or less) likely to visit your page and provide feedback.

Likes: Determine if the posts that get the most Likes have anything in common. Is there a difference when you specifically ask for a Like?

Comments: What types of posts are users more or less likely to comment on? Are those comments positive or negative? Do you see a connection between the number of Likes and the number and/or types of comments? Again, look for patterns.

Unsubscribes: People un-Like brands all the time for all kinds of reasons, but if you see a sudden spike in unsubscribes, try to figure out why.

External referrers and new Likes: Get an idea of whether time spent promoting your page on other platforms is paying off. While you can’t see which site sent a specific new fan, you can see which sites were sending visitors around the time you acquired new fans.

Demographics: Understand who your visitors are so you can segment them into groups and target them with specific messages visible only to them.

Use your Facebook Insights analysis to improve your Facebook marketing by doing more of what fans like.

Facebook has left its past as a college networking site far behind and is becoming ever more valuable for businesses. A recent study by U.K.-based Hitwise shows that using Facebook for your business translates into more sales. What business doesn’t want more sales?

A California trucking accident attorney at Otus Law Group has assisted the CaseDetails editorial team in identifying topics of importance to readers of this blog.

As discussed by Greg Finn in Retail Study: 1 Facebook Fan = 20 Visits To Your Website, the study looked at how Facebook increased traffic to retailers’ websites. It evaluated the way Facebook fans increase traffic, as well as how visits to Facebook increase searches for the retailers, regardless of fan status.

Facebook’s monthly traffic is second only to Google in both the U.K. and the U.S., so it shouldn’t be surprising that it influences other online behavior. So what do the data show?

• Top retailers can get an average of 62,000 monthly visits from Facebook, without having any Facebook fans.
• Each new fan increases visits to the brand’s website by 20. Imagine what a few hundred fans can do.
• Those extra visits drive sales. This holds true for both online and offline sales.
• Consumers searched on brand names as much as 54 percent more often after visiting the brands’ Facebook pages.

This Hitwise study was based on data from the largest, most popular U.K. retailers, but there’s no reason to believe it isn’t equally valid for other businesses and other countries. The statistics may vary somewhat based on factors such as industry and business size, but the overall benefits are clear.

These numbers provide a useful starting point to help you quantify social media’s rather elusive ROI and justify time spent creating and maintaining a Facebook presence for your business.