Social media websites grew at exponential rates in 2009. According to a report where Twitter grew at a staggering rate of more than 1000%, Facebook also achieved a growth rate of 228%. 2009 was also a year when most businesses joined social media websites like Twitter and Facebook to promote their brand. It is a well known fact that social media would be one of the most important factors which will affect all business either online or offline. So here are some tips that businesses should follow in 2010 for their social marketing campaigns.

Web 2.0 Customer Support: – Since most of your target audience would be using these websites, you have to make sure that you provide information about your products and customer support to your clients on such websites. Many companies are providing customer support via Twitter very successfully, but the majority of businesses are still not adopting this.

Niche Groups Would Become Powerful: – Groups and communities on such websites would become more powerful than now. People would be depending on reviews from such groups before making any decisions so you need to work hard to be a dominating member of such groups.

Reputation Management: – Reputation of your business would heavily depend on how many followers you have on Twitter or how many fans you have on your Facebook page. Also companies will start providing reputation management services where you can pay them to monitor your brand reputation for you.

Optimize Twitter/Facebook Updates: – Since Google has already started showing real time searches in its results and other search engines are working on methods to show real time search results by collecting data from social media websites you might have to optimize your Twitter /Facebook updates for search engines.

Social Media Policy: – In the next year you might also need a foolproof social media policy for your business which would tell your employees about how to behave on social media websites, in which communities they can participate and what messages to post on social media websites.

Social Media Search: – The search feature of social media would be much more powerful. People would prefer to search on Twitter for real time searches based on their location and small business would invest more time to remain at top in such searches.

Influence Search Engine Rankings: – Search engines may start giving more importance to social media profiles in their ranking algorithm. The more active a brand is on social media, the more importance could be given to its website in SERP.

Social Media Tools: – A number of third party applications would increase which will help you to manage your social media campaign on all popular social media websites with one click by telling you at what time of day more people talk about your product and when they talk about your competitors products.

About The Guest Author: Rudo Malequin works as Internet Marketing Executive for Fortepromo which creates customized promotional products for startups that help them to promote their brand in market.