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The following is a guest post from sitebumpers.com.

Booze and Co is predicting that social commerce will hit $14 billion by 2015. A similar study from Gartner predicts that social media will account for 50% of web sales by 2015. It would be silly to ignore the power social media marketing can bring to your business during the holiday season.

If you haven’t started riding the social wave, you’re missing out on huge sales potential, especially if you are a B2C business. Here are five tips to optimize your social media marketing campaign during the holidays.

1.    Conduct a promotion/give-away on all of your social media marketing platforms to increase your fan base and spread the word about your products/services. Try to get your followers talking about your products and services and sharing your promotion or give-away.  Your simple holiday promotion could go viral and increase your holiday sales substantially. Give a little and you might get a lot more in return.
2.    Far more people are using smart phones to do social media. Pay for some sponsored listings on your most popular social media marketing platforms. According to a study from comScore, there has been a 16% increase in online spending in the beginning of November of this year. Placing a few ads on your high traffic social media platforms can only help your holiday numbers, especially since they are still relatively cheap in the online marketing ad world.
3.    Always make sure your social media marketing links are on all of your advertisements. You can encourage people to like your page by offering something a discount or freebie. Every like is viewed by friends of that fan and all followers see who that follower followed…again, the real advantage of social media is the potential to take messages viral.
4.    Engage with your followers and fans. Social media platforms are all about communication. Conducting a promotion or a give-away is a great strategy but you will need to take it a step further and make sure you share a personal connection with your fans and followers. Ask questions! Take polls! They don’t even need to have anything to do with your business. Sometimes just getting people to engage is a great way to get your name in the front of their minds (and in front of their friends’ and followers’ minds). For instance, a cowboy boot company once took a poll to see which way people liked their toilet paper fed – over the top, from the back, or sitting on the back of the toilet. Thousands of people weighed in and this simple poll ended up being huge brand placement for this boot company.
5.    Be funny and entertaining! Have you seen those postcard-looking images with the illustrations and funny comments? Those get shared like a virus. Maybe create one of your own and slap your URL at the bottom…or share some that you like to get some more shares and retweets. People are always looking for a good laugh and if they enjoy your sense of humor, you may find some more fans for life!

It’s not too late to get on the holiday social media marketing bandwagon. In fact, it’s as smart a time as ever to join in on the fun! Happy holidays.

Timing your activity on Twitter can make a huge difference in the type of exposure you receive. Understanding the best time to engage your audience is important, but there are different points on when to share. Dan Zarella just discussed a new strategy he calls contra-competitive tweeting. What is he referring to? Contra-competitive tweeting is using Twitter when no one else is to get more exposure and retweets.

I have heard that the best time to get exposure for my tweets was during certain sweet points. Three years ago, I read a post from Pear Analytics that talked about the best times to send a tweet to Twitter. I even wrote a post about this in Young Entrepreneur last year. This study claimed that the best time to get exposure on Twitter was at 12:30 and the best day of the week was on Monday.

I believed every word of this advice. Pear Analytics did a very thorough study and I definitely look at quantitative data. However, Dan’s data showed that following Pear Analytics data could be completely wrong.

Wait for Your Competitors to Shut Up

Dan’s research found that the best time to send a tweet was when no one else was talking. When you first hear this, it is understandably a little counter-intuitive. On the one, hand it seems like you would get more tweets when you don’t have to shout to make your voice heard with caps or extra hashtags (which can be annoying to your followers). On the other hand, wouldn’t these “dead” times be the times when no one else is listening?

Maybe not. After reading Dan’s post, I started wondering about something. How many hours do people spend on Facebook. I know friends who are on Facebook several hours a day. However, they aren’t always posting. There seem to be certain times when people just want to watch from the sidelines.

Maybe Dan has noticed a piece of human nature exhibited through social media. Many people can’t be the person who is always jumping in and starting a new conversation. We’ve probably all seen this at parties or other events we’ve been to. Some people are just tired from work or in a place where they aren’t in a mood to set things into motion. Instead, they just wait for someone else to get the ball rolling.

Maybe the reason Dan gets more retweets on Saturdays is because that is the time people just feel like watching what’s going on. Maybe they are too exhausted from the work week or hung over from a late Friday night to be an active Twitter user. However, they may be passively be idling their time, waiting for someone else to share the next cool tip or funny link. When they see it, they just have to click the retweet button.

Dan is something of a social media guru. If this man talks, I end up listening to what he has to say. Maybe I will need to start scheduling my tweets at different times.

Have you had any luck with the contra-positive tweeting Dan talks about?

People spend more time on Facebook than any other website in the world. You can choose not to use Facebook to promote your business, but you’d have to be a fool to ignore the opportunities it provides. Facebook can provide more targeted traffic than Google.

Many web gurus publish secrets on getting Facebook traffic. Although there are some pretty creative ways to generate business through Facebook, the business model is really pretty straightforward. You need to be friendly, honest, engaging and persuasive. Spammers don’t get anywhere with Facebook. If you are a genuine human being and  a compelling marketer, you will win almost every time.

Steps to a Great Facebook Marketing Strategy

The shot-gun approach won’t work with Facebook. Remember, you are promoting material to your own friends. You don’t want to upset them by spamming them. You also don’t want to develop a reputation for developing dishonest marketing tactics. Unfortunately, there are too many unscrupulous marketers on Facebook already.

How Will Facebook Help My Company?

Here are some ways an honest marketer can help their business thrive on Facebook:

1. Take advantage of groups. People join Facebook groups to build a rapport with other people who share a common interest. There is a group for almost everything from “Reasons Why I Hate Bed Bugs” to “Internet Business.” Facebook groups can be very general or very specific. You may want to join the more specific groups, but only if they relate to your niche. Focus on groups that have a reasonable number of members with an interest in the product or service you are promoting.
2. Facebook fan pages. One of the best ways to use Facebook is to create a fan page for your business. There is no reason not to have a professionally laid out page for your business on the most popular website in the world. The best part is that people will “like” your fan page. Other Facebook users will be impressed when you get a lot of “Likes” and be more interested in checking out your business. Word of mouth has always been one of the most effective ways to generate new business. A Facebook fan page is a great way to get the word out about your business.
3. Develop Facebook applications. Facebook applications are awesome tools to take your business viral. Some applications have millions of users. The Cityville application has over 77 million users and receives over 200,000 more every day. You can come up with a killer idea for a new Facebook app and watch your content really catch on.
4. Advertising. Paying for Facebook ads is another way you can get some great exposure to your business. The value of Facebook ads is questionable, but it shouldn’t be entirely discounted. Users prefer to interact with the site itself, so you might get more of a benefit by participating in groups. Still, these ads are a great way to target a very specific demographic. Facebook data-mines different people’s profiles and will help you target the most appropriate audience.
5. Facebook site plugins. You can also put Facebook plugins in your own site. Visitors to your site can then share your content with their friends. This is an effective way to take your content viral with minimal effort.

Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the world. There are countless ways Facebook helps businesses build their brand and increase their sales. Any smart business should consider promoting their work on Facebook.

Many businesses measure the effectiveness of their Facebook campaign by the number of fans they have.  This simple metric doesn’t even begin to measure the effectiveness of their Facebook campaign.

If you want to make the most of your Facebook marketing campaign, you are going to have to be smarter than 99% of the businesses who use it as a promotional tool.  Establish your benchmarks (sales, traffic to your website etc.) and develop a system for measuring them.  Here are a few other things you should think about:

1. 1. Traffic to Your Fan Page. You want to know that people are finding you.  Don’t be discouraged that not all of your visitors are going to become fans.  Many people don’t want to use the like button on Facebook or are too focused on learning more about your business.  Determine which traffic helps your business and how much is just noise.  This may help you realize that you need to change the structure of your fan page to improve the experience of your visitors and the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.
2. 2. Number of Active Fans. You may be excited about having 1,000 followers on your fan page, but you should ask yourself how loyal those fans are.  Many people are click-happy with the Like button and a much smaller percentage add any value to the community.
3. 3. Demographics of your Visitors.  Most of your visitors are probably not going be interested in your business.  If your convergence rate is much smaller than you would have expected, you may be attracting the wrong visitors.  You need statistics that will tell you how well optimized your page is for your target audience.

There are a variety of ways that you can measure traffic to your Facebook pages and track conversions.  The best place to start is determining how engaged your community is.  The number of wall posts and discussions will tell you how many people interact on your Facebook page.  Even if some of the feedback is negative, at least you know that you’ve got them engaged.

There are a number of free analytics programs that you should take advantage of to measure traffic and demographics.  SocialToo is a popular tool that provides detailed analytics such as:

• Unique and returning visitors
• Location of your visitors
• How they found your page
• What browsers they used
• How long they spent on your site

All you need to do is create a free account and SocialToo will track all of your social media profiles for you.  You can also measure the effectiveness of any Facebook app you launched.

You can also use Google Analytics on your Facebook fan pages as well.  You will probably need a Static FBML app to insert the Analytics code.  Otherwise, you should have no problem integrating your Even Analytics account with Facebook.  Google Analytics will give you the same information as SocialToo, but you will only be installing it on your Facebook account.

Once you’ve looked at your analytics data, compare it to your benchmarks.  If you feel that sales and traffic have declined, start thinking about how you can improve your Facebook strategy.  The bottom line is to work on your Facebook strategy every day if possible.  You will need to be consistent if you hope to get any loyalty from your followers.