Believe it or not, the social media has taken over the business arena. More and more people are using various social media platforms in their daily interactions and decisions are being influence by information gathered from places like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Businesses have started taking advantage of this to review and redirect their overall marketing strategies. The concept of social selling which is a way of entering into a discussion with the customer has taken over from the coercive marketing strategies that existed before. New trends have emerged  in social media selling.

The first of these is location based marketing. The emergence of features like Facebook places gives the chance to marketers ton target customers in a particular location. These days companies  targeting their sales moves to particular areas instead of the general broad based way of selling. It is now possible for local businesses to access how well their products and services are doing well in their locality, find out what people are saying and give appropriate reactions.

Group selling

This is the follow up from the Groupon concept that offers a discount to people when could get organized to make a purchase. This unique concept is fastly catching up with most businesses because of what it offers to both the business the consumers: high volumes of sales at a time, which will lead to quantum leaps in revenue. But this depends on how the business can create trust and confidence in those who will lead in creating such groups.

Video platforms

Another feature of social media that marketers are now exploiting is the use of video platforms such as YouTube. Information about brands and products is being presented in the form of videos and shared on various video platforms. These videos instead of being coercive, try to engage the customer and seek their opinions. The ability to link posts from such platforms to others like Facebook makes the use of videos a powerful way of driving the sales campaigns. In the near future, we are sure to see many more of these platforms developing.

Text campaigns

Another feature of the social media revolution is the move from the computer to mobile devices which receive instant messages. Marketers are taking advantage of this to develop applications that send text messages right from the website to targeted groups based on location and area codes. In addition, mobile payments systems are being developed so that people can now easily buy and pay for goods and services from their mobile phones and other devices through SMS applications.

Presentation platforms

It has now become easy to create a presentation online on such platforms as SlideRocket and present them live online. The new trend in social media is that people want to see the one doing the presentation and interact with them on the personal level.

Conversation monitoring

Gone are the days of moderated reviews that only allow a few negative opinions. Today, marketers are using various means of review platforms to listen to what consumers are saying about  their products. Such platforms offer the chance to join in such conversations and to provide needed reactions and clarifications.

Social eCommerce is on a steady rise these days and we can see a lot of social network monetization strategies in the coming days. People have already started doing social commerce or social shopping and the most popular of them is by setting up a store on Facebook and promoting the products.