The future of your Social Media Success is not chasing friends and followers, but rather influencing what they are talking about. Therefore, your most important decision this year won’t be the amount of money you spend recruiting fans on Facebook, but rather the investment you make in the stories through which your brand tells your customers what it stands for.

Here are five ideas to get you started today:

1. Build A Dedicated Content Team: You need a strong set of video assets for YouTube, interesting articles for your blog and newsletter, whitepapers and controversial thought pieces, and other interesting content for people to share on their networks.

2. Close The Loop: Spend time understanding the new tools of inbound marketing, and track which articles and videos attract the most leads, and which of those leads end up becoming customers.

3. Bring In The Anthropologists: You may know what kinds of stories you want to tell, but what stories are your customers listening to or already telling each other about your products? Immerse yourself in your customers’ lives to gain critical insights into how to make your brands truly a part of their story.

4. Leverage Pinterest: Spend some time on Pinterest and you will realise that the future business model of that platform may lie in the incredible data on product and brand affinity it offers marketers.

5. Scale Global, Talk Local: Global CMOs will have the increasingly tough challenge of navigating the tensions between global values and local context, but the companies that become adept at this, will be clear winners in the digital space.

A recent study by Sociable Labs which included 1088 online shoppers revealed that social sharing is as helpful as Google search in shopping.

The major takeaways from the study are:

1. Social Sharing is a Vital Activity for Discovering What to Buy: 62% of online shoppershave read product related comments from their friends on Facebook.

2. Social Sharing Causes Consumers to Act: 75% of shoppers who read social sharing comments have clicked on the product link in their friends’ Facebook posts, taking them to the product page on a retailer’s website. 53% of the shoppers who have clicked through to the retailer’s site have made a purchase.

3. Positive Social Sharing Creates a Virtuous Cycle of Sharing and Purchasing: 81% of consumers who purchase products they learn about through social sharing are valuable social sharers themselves, thus creating a cycle of sharing and buying.

4. “Social Proofing” – Increases Confidence in Buying: The study showed that 32% of visitors are more likely to stay and shop on a site that shows activities of shoppers who have purchased there, even when those shoppers are not their friends. When they shared activities include the shopping behavior of the visitor’s friends, that number nearly doubles to 62%. With respect to purchase, 57% of shoppers are more likely to purchase on a site that shows their friends who have purchased on that site.

5. Match the Motivations of Sharers to Share with the Motivations of Shoppers to Act: When comparing sharer and shopper motivations, a key takeaway from the study is to encourage sharers to include the reasons they bought the product, as this is the strongest motivator for shoppers to act.

The gap between how companies market with media and how customers consume media is significant. In some industries, especially technology, up to 90% of buying decisions start with an online search. Despite this, the marketing budget for digital media as a share of overall advertising spend is only 8%.

A study by PulsePoint Group in conjunction with “The Economist” Intelligence Unit titled “The Economics of the Socially Engaged Enterprise” has revealed that the socially engaged companies have a 400% greater impact.

The study also outlined the steps that are essential to becoming a socially engaged business.

Step 1: Plan It

1. Get Executives Sold and Comitted: The CEO and the executives will need to be convinced that there will be a return on investment to be a socially engaged enterprise before committing the budget required.

2. Develop a Strategy: Developing a strategy that is clear on its goals and audience is the next phase. It includes weaving the strategy into the existing marketing plans so that they are synergistic and relevant.

Step 2: Build It

1. Select your SWAT Team: This could be internal or a mix of internal and external staff that are passionate and skilled about teaching, training and evangelizing employees on an ongoing basis. This team will also need to choose the technologies required to achieve the strategic goals.

2. Create a Social Media Command and Listening Center: Obtaining real time information that provides feedback from your customers on Facebook and Twitter and other social networks will assist you with determining if your products and services are resonating with your market.

3. Integrate Social Engagement into every Department: A socially engaged company will make rapid changes to its products and customer service approach as feedback and comments that are monitored on the command center are received, taken on board and then acted on.

4. Create a Publishing Plan and Schedule for your Content: You will need to plan your blog posts, Facebook updates, YouTube videos and other updates to your social network outposts that will be relevant for your audience, goals and brand message.

Step 3: Drive It

1. Keep the Technology Up to Date: Social Media is a fast moving and ever evolving technology, ensuring that the technology platforms are up to date and are providing the right tools to be efficient is vital.

2. Learn from Your Mistakes and Celebrate your Wins: You will make mistakes as the socially engaged enterprise is still a new and emerging marketing discipline. Make adjustments quickly and move on. Celebrate wins with the team regularly to reinforce a success culture.

3. Assess Regularly: As with all proper business practice, develop a weekly management process that ensures that assessment of progress is made and the appropriate adjustments implemented. This will ensure long term success.

Is your business on Pinterest yet? No? Well, what are you waiting for? After all, it’s only quite possibly the hottest thing going in the Social Media space today. We have clearly reached the point where we can say this thing is not a fad. Pinterest is a powerhouse that social marketers can no longer afford to ignore.

More Traffic Your Way: One of the main reasons more social marketers are giving Pinterest a closer look is because of its ability to drive traffic. Sure, the site is still operating on an invitation-only basis, but that has not stopped it from racking up more than 10 million users in a very short amount of time. Pinterest allows to pin all types of stuff to virtual boards, stuff that links back to your website, blog, or favorite social hangout.

Tremendous SEO Value: Pinterest also offers plenty of SEO value, which as you know, could translate to an increase in traffic as well. When a user pins content to a given board, that process creates a link that connects to a third-party site. Linking is one of the key factors search engines like Google take into consideration, and with Pinterest gaining in popularity, it is also growing as a trustworthy domain.

Great for Branding: Another thing social marketers are learning about Pinterest is that it can be a phenomenal branding tool. A platform that makes it easy to create both exposure and community around a product, company, or topic. Just like other social networks, this one has features such as following and commenting, so you can reach out and really start engaging your audience if you put the right tools to use.

According to an AYTM Market Research Study, 42% of Twitter users rarely tweet from their own accounts. The study surveyed 200 Twitter users by asking, “How often do you tweet?” This seems surprising considering as of June 2011 there were 200 million tweets generated per day.

The study had a broad focus group of 200 individuals answering a few questions about their daily Twitter use. Of these users, 43% signed up for Twitter within the last 1-2 years. A staggering 31.5% of these users rarely log on, to read tweets from those they follow. While 75% of these users surveyed follow less than 100 accounts.

Are Twitter users apathetic? Can a comparison be drawn from how long a person’s been using Twitter to how active they are on the network? Is a small portion of the Twitter audience creating the most amount of tweets? More studies analyzing these type of correlations will be extremely helpful in generating a better understanding of how users are really using Twitter.

Download the full study here for more insights about these users, as well as graphs highlighting the results of each question: AYTM Twitter Survey