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According to the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, B2B marketers are not only using social media; they are succeeding with it. This report contains a snapshot of how B2B marketers are using social media and the benefits they’re gaining from it. The report suggests that devoting 6 hours a week to social media marketing can build your brand and help improve sales. According to the study, over 93 percent …

Online merchants know it’s important to interact with consumers and expand website traffic to increase sales. Online sellers use may Internet marketing tactics to this end. An excellent tactic for building traffic and interest in your products is to post and network on social media sites, which can result in many interesting conversations and more qualified traffic to your site. Below is TopTenWholesale’s list of social media sites for building traffic.

Retailing for Christmas 2011 is now behind us, and many forecasted it would be one of the more difficult Christmas trading periods we have had for a number of years. In the lead up to Christmas, I travelled through Europe and the Americas and found that retailers and businesses were coming up with novel ways of creating ideas for the consumer experience. These are the top ten ideas I discovered.

An online study conducted by ROI Research for performance marketing firm Performics in September and October 2011 found men are more likely than women to conduct social shopping activities online. This includes activities like product information and review information research, product comparisons, product availability check and store information retrieval via social networks, shopping sites and deal sites like Groupon and Living Social.

Our article about Mobile Marketing got a lot of interest from wholesalers and general merchandise vendors last month. While integrating social, mobile and email campaigns can yield great results, we know many merchants are not yet using integrated online marketing campaigns. Therefore, we’d like to provide information about social, mobile email integrated campaigns for your online marketing strategy as these media are used daily by consumers and marketers alike.

Since the advent of social media, wholesalers and general merchandise vendors have seen a significant change in B2B buying behavior, especially over the past few years. People are using social networks to access and share many different kinds of information about companies, brands and products. As a result, wholesalers are using social media marketing tactics more and more on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

The Google Plus project has been operational for a couple weeks and seems to be catching on “like wildfire.” Yesterday, Paul Allen estimated 4.5 million users. Today, Clint Boulton of eWeek said it passed the 10 million mark! It remains to be seen if Google will surpass Facebook in social networking, but at its current adoption rate, Google Plus could finally be the move that breaks the Facebook juggernaut. Google has a good chance to get ahead since it’s been around since 1998 and everybody from your kids to your grandparents use it every day.

Wholesalers and general merchandise vendors looking to improve customer service might want to consider the benefits social networking communities can have on their business. Social media communities are full of like-minded people who want to share, discuss, and learn more about industry issues. There can be common interests in the goods and services sold online, as well as many other topics such as returned goods, online fraud and promotions that work. Given the opportunity, wholesalers can capitalize on the ability to communicate with their current and prospective customers.

A recently published Government-sponsored report in Australia revealed that, in the view of the author, small retail businesses would not exist in five years. No more independent bookshops, news agents, garden centres or travel agents. I can accept that we are seeing dramatic changes, but the disappearance of these sectors in retailing takes some digesting.

Dealers in the business are looking for suppliers that can meet the needs of customers that range from dropshippers and wholesale buyers, all the way to large quantity retail opportunities, and companies like Outdoor Active Gear are doing their part to make the process as smooth, efficient, and painless as possible for everyone.

Wholesale businesses and small businesses with limited resources in time and money are beginning to use low-cost marketing tactics on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to increase sales. A survey by MerchantCircle’s quarterly Merchant Confidence Index recently reported social media marketing has increased by 40 percent over the past 12 months. Some of the key conclusions of the survey are outlined below, as well as a list of social media marketing tips.

The way we search on the web is changing as new search engines make social networking a part of the search experience. New search engine Blekko allows searchers to use their Facebook friends to filter web queries. Montage from Microsoft’s Future Social Experience Labs (FUSE) allows users to gather recent web content on a specific topic, making a digital album of their links for sharing on Twitter or Facebook.

2010 came to a close with a bang, and 2011 promises to be even better. It’s time for wholesalers, manufacturers and retailers to learn from the digital trends of last year for use in increasing sales and profits this year. 2010 was the year of social media with Google playing catch-up. We also saw the rise of Facebook, the ubiquity of Twitter, the propagation of mobile marketing and the promise of video advertising.

Technology has played an undeniable role in the lives of everyone, and for Internet marketing it’s been a real era of discovery these past ten years. As bigger corporations and bodies are making the switch from experimentation to integration, owing to their relatively large marketing budgets and resources, smaller companies and independent players can benefit from learning their methods. It also pays to know what insiders have been learning as they contributed to the pool of knowledge, too. One of the key areas of development is in budgeting for social media marketing, especially during a time when every dollar counts.

While much has been said about the rising numbers in the male demographic for online spending this year, little has been covered in the area of their female counterparts. In particular, the younger, more “switched on” teenage market segment of the female consumer population has attracted a great deal of interest from Internet marketers everywhere, as they continue to spur a growing trend in mobile buying power that was perhaps unexpected.