Early on during an economic downturn, companies cut marketing communications (marcom or marcomm) staff, often too deeply. Then they realize that there's still a lot of work that needs to get done to maintain a market presence.

In today’s society, the news is traveling at the speed it takes for one to hit the enter key. Is social media the main reason that the speed of news travel has increased? It sure is!

Social Media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and many others offer the potential for free media attention and press coverage.

The main reason many small businesses aren’t utilizing social media is that they believe it doesn’t work, when in fact it does!

Instagram Getting More Exposure for Brands

As picture editing and sharing becomes more and more popular, Instagram has boomed from 15 million to 80 million users since the merge with Facebook back in April.

With such a huge boom in members, it is no wonder that brands are now using Instagram as a marketing tool. There are so many perks to using Instagram as a marketing tool:

• It is a social network and photo editing tool

• Encourages visual storytelling

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Busy marketing managers often question how to analyze their marketing campaigns. In addition to asking how to perform marketing analysis, marketers aren’t sure what they need to measure. They are often overwhelmed by all the information out there, let alone which data to measure and how.

Marketing is all about pushing the company messages out to target audiences through a variety of channels, which can include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. However, social media is about engaging in conversations with your target audience, something that push marketers aren’t that skilled at. Try promoting your business on Twitter and Facebook, and you will lose followers. Social media is not specifically for lead generation (marketing) but more for raising brand awareness and thought leadership (PR).

With all this socializing going on, the challenge of coordinating and integrating messages across multiple social networks platforms has become top-of-mind. Businesses, large and small, are using social media platforms – but for very different reasons.

20 Twitter Marketing Tips for Social Media Success Everyone tweets these days, but some people just don't get it. Social Media can be a great marketing tool for spreading the word about your company, yourself, your industry, your customers, etc. Here are some tips to make you successful!

Market Smarter with these Marketing Tips & Trends

But Keep On Marketing!

A survey says marketers will focus on delivering programs that save their organizations money while attracting new and repeat business using focused engagement strategies. One key point of the survey is that in previous downturns, the firms that learned to market smarter have fared better than those that decreased their marketing budgets.