* 57.7% of respondents “ideally” plan, and

* 56.3% “realistically” plan to include social media in their media plans next year.

The key phrase here is “plan” as without a well researched social media strategy, there will likely be numerous failed social media initiatives.

Here is some steps social media strategy that Sally Falkow developed and has presented at several social media bootcamps:

1. Listen to conversations – what good or bad things are they saying about you and your competitors?

2. Establish share of voice – there are already conversations going on – what share do you have?

3. Set goals/benchmarks – using the data collected work out your goals and benchmarks (i.e. what your starting point is).

4. Find bloggers and communities – locate the bloggers and communities that will be of interest to you going forward.

5. Identify influencers – who do your customers trust?

6. Develop a content strategy – what content will your target communities and influencers be interested in?

7. Pick tools – should you blog or be on Facebook, Twitter or other sites?

8. Create and deliver the content – create the blog posts, Twitter posts and so on.

9. Engage and facilitate conversations – don’t just publish content, engage with your audiences. A conversation is two way.

10. Measure results – set up and monitor metrics to manage the program.

What are the basics of article marketing? Well, article marketing in itself is simply the use of written content to tap targeted markets for the purpose of increasing web traffic, conversion rates, and, ultimately, sales. If you are a business trying to thrive in a cutthroat and competitive online world, then article marketing may do you a world of good.

All article marketing needs is a knowledge of keyword research and quality writing to ensure positive results. Keyword research, first of all, is important because it tries to foretell the search keywords that your target market will use to look for a relevant website (such as yours). To find the most appropriate keywords for your blog, you may use a research tool such as Google Adwords. AdWords helps you by showing you the most popular search terms for your topic, so that you have some idea of which keywords you need to incorporate in your content.

Content is usually the more difficult factor to pull off. Article marketing requries fresh, unique and relevant writing. Search engines are in search of articles that are original, and once they detect a resemblance between your article and one from another website, they will take it as a fact that you only copied or paraphrased your article and, in a worst case scenario, may possibly blacklist you and prevent you from appearing in search engine results. This is why tests such as Copyscape are also good to use. All you need to do is to copy-paste your article into the blank field and it will do a search on different search engines to check for similar content.

If you are a blogger or businessman who is just starting out online, then you may have to do the writing yourself since you will not have the budget to hire a team of writers. However, there are also content spinners that you can use-these are computer programs and software designed to imitate the work of an article writer. All you have to do is create one original article and the program will create different versions of it for you in mere minutes. However, the downside of this is that you may end up with over-stuffed and bland content.