We get excited when we get a chance to ahead forward with our full-service clients and strategize on the trends and tools that that will shape the coming year. Recently we gave some general ideas on how to create a social marketing plan for 2012. Today we’ll build on that and share some of the insight and best practices we’ve been developing with our premium clients.

As always, to go deeper on how each of these concepts can be integrated into your plans for next year, simply contact us. Without further ado, here are three important trends to bank on in 2012:

Go Mobile: Mobile continues to be adopted heavily as a research and purchasing tool by savvy consumers, accounting for 14% of all Black Friday traffic by some reports. Marketers should view it as a core tenet of 2012 planning. Stay ahead of the curve in 2012 and interact with your on-the-go audience in fun and unique ways. Utilize check-ins, instant offers or coupons to engage your audience in real-time. Think about using QR codes, which are underused and often misunderstood; when used properly they can help drive consumer behavior and can be a great compliment to a promotion such as a sweepstakes. Go beyond the web and reach customers in person or through print ads that utilize QR codes to drive consumers to your website, social channels, or a dedicated microsite.

Go Cross-Platform: Cross-channel promotions are becoming more essential than ever, as Google+ and other platforms continue to grow in popularity and cater to different user types and behaviors. The most social brands on the web are already experimenting with Google+ to find ways to authentically interact with their audience on this emerging platform. Google already announced that promotions cannot be hosted on the social network, surprising many brands that look to promotions to grow their audiences and interact with their fans. Instead, brands can use dedicated microsites, promoted and linked from their Google+ pages like they already do with Twitter sweepstakes, as the hub of a promotion geared toward their Google+ audiences. Microsites are the perfect way to allow engagement for users from their preferred networks, while controlling the visual branding, sharing tools and features.

Get In the Cloud: You know about the cloud, but you thought it was just for storage, security or distributed processing? It’s time to take your marketing into the cloud, too. Proactive brand marketers, already investing resources to engage audiences across social channels, think of their marketing as an always-on service targeted across a vast network of consumers, rather than a series of one-off campaigns and promotions. They use technology partners to deliver on-demand marketing utilities, ranging from promotions to branded apps to powerful back-end management and metrics dashboard.

You can start integrating the cloud by licensing a Software-as-a-Service tool (such as the Votigo Platform for creating audience engaging apps across all social platforms) or by tapping into a powerful API which your own developers can use to build out the social marketing apps that your need to take your audience to the next level.

Mobile…cross-platform…cloud.  Three technology trends in a grander context, and three critical components of your 2012 plan.  Check back here often, sign up to hear from us, or follow us on Twitter for frequent updates, offers, and examples of great executions.

When it comes to creating a winning social media promotion it’s all in the details, and no detail is too small. One seemingly small detail that can have a huge impact on the success of your campaign is the use of a custom graphic. When you create your own campaign with our new self-serve tool, you have the option of uploading a custom graphic into your header. You’ll want to take advantage of this feature, as it can help generate more entries and ultimately more fans for your Facebook page.

So, what makes a great graphic? The best graphics include your campaign details in a clean and straightforward design. This allows fans to get a general idea of what’s required to enter your promotion and what they have a chance to win, quickly and without having to read rules and details.
Here are a few ideas for creating a winning graphic:

1. List the steps required to enter your promotion so that people can see how easy it is to win
2. List the prizes at stake to get your fans excited
3. Take advantage of the space. You can upload large graphics with a maximum width of 520 pixels and a maximum height of 900 pixels

Create a great graphic and you’re well on your way to a successful promotion that grows your audience and engages your fans. Need more ideas for creating a winning promotion? Here are 5 tips for making your contest a success.

It may seem like a no-brainer to connect your social media promotion to an event. That’s because events have, built-in, some of the most important components of a successful, audience-building, awareness-generating social media promotion:

1) The definitive, time-sensitive attention of an audience
2) An easy-to-integrate theme
3) And often a logical prize that goes perfectly with the occasion (tickets, access, a timely discount or gift)

Sporting events…concerts…product launches…conferences and conventions…even social media milestones (”Our 1,000,000th Follower!”)…these are all great events that savvy marketers effectively tie their promotions to.

Holidays- and the frenzied weeks that precede them- may be the single best sort of event to serve as a promotional anchor.

This week we read that Americans will spend close to $7B on Halloween by October 31- or 18% more than we did last year. Not surprisingly, recent use of our newly-launched self-service platform reflects a HUGE emphasis on Halloween promotion. Seemingly every other sweepstakes launched over the past week is Halloween-themed, from ticket giveaways for haunted houses to best dog costume photo contests. Some of these contests have engaged hundreds of entries almost immediately. And some great ones have come out of our full-services, like this costume contest from The Children’s Place.

So as a social media marketer, what do you turn your attention to once the Halloween rush subsides on Tuesday?

Holiday retail. While the holiday bonanza official kicks off in the wee hours of Black Friday, Nov. 25, when throngs of Early Bird shoppers line up for morning-after-Thanksgiving specials to OFFICIALLY launch the retail spree that runs through Christmas Eve and, really, New Year’s, the reality is that holiday commerce is already underway.

Votigo clients are well on their way to an impressive variety of contests, sweepstakes, mobile promotions (including check-in and coupon-based giveaways) and much more. Some are keeping it simple: a Facebook photo contest asking fans to submit a snapshot of them demonstrating their need for / favorite use of / funny drawing of a newly launched product or holiday favorite gift item.

Others will get more sophisticated with a cross-platform campaign that first captures audience attention on Facebook OR Twitter and a branded microsite, then drives them to a store for a chance at a mobile instant win or a coupon offer, and finally invites users to spread the word for additional votes (for a photo contest) or sweepstakes entries. These strategies work especially well for retailers, from mom-and-pop shops to national chains.

So even though it’s nearly All Hallow’s Eve- and that means Black Friday is a mere month away- there is still time to create your own promotion in our self-service tool or call our full-service team to get started on a premium promotion.

For some serious design inspiration - in terms of both hand-drawn artistry and tech-driven social promotions - check out Sharpie’s visually stunning new US homepage. The redesigned site anchors a campaign challenging users to Start Something With Sharpie and showcases their artistic inspiration, allowing viewers to rate and share an incredible array of art (on a variety of surfaces- from paper and canvas to forearms and surfboards).

Also check out Laurie’s Sullivan’s MediaPost story yesterday on the campaign, highlighting Sharpie’s wildly successful YouTube takeover in August. The centerpiece: an expanding interactive ad unit that was a mosaic of submissions. The DraftFCB-designed campaign garnered 62M impressions, drove 7x the normal traffic to Sharpie.com, and inspired hundreds more pieces of art for the mosaic, also propelling the brand’s Facebook page passed the 2M fans mark, according to Sullivan.

Votigo’s Developer API, powering the mosaic and homepage gallery, is a complete back-end solution for brands with design resources and a promotions strategy that involves launching powerful, secure promotions on websites, social channels and mobile. Please contact us if you would like to hear more about Votigo’s Developer API.