Social Media Examiner released this week their fourth annual social media study, which has grabbed the attention of more than 3,800 marketers to tell us where they see the future of social media activities heading. It is stated in the report that an overwhelming majority of 94% say they use social media in order to market their business; while 83% feel social media is important for their business. With so much likability, any online marketing agency should analyze this year’s industry report to help your business utilize this service.

So if marketers can agree that social media has an impact on their business how much time exactly should we be spending on our social media efforts? According to the report, 59% of marketers implement social media efforts 6+ hours a week, with 33% devoting 11+ hours a week. It was also noted that those aged 20-29 are spending the most time in social media, with 43% spending 11+ hours a week.

Now that we better understand the time commitment, what do marketers see as the biggest benefit about social media? 85% believe that increasing exposure is the biggest benefit of social media, with increasing traffic following close behind with a 69% response rate. An important takeaway from this part of the study is that 58% of marketers who have been utilizing social media efforts for three years believe it has helped improve sales.

In terms of which tools we should be utilizing, 92% responded with Facebook as the most used social media platform. Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, and YouTube took the next four spots. It was interesting to see that even with Google+ being newly added this year to the report, 40% of social media marketers are using this platform. Google+ was also the platform that marketers are most interested in learning more about (ousting last year’s winner, Facebook). Also added new this year was the category, photo sharing sites (including the new Pinterest platform) with a 21% user rate.

Aside from social media marketing, marketers view email marketing, search engine optimization, and event marketing as the top three services they are also implementing. Surprisingly, pay per click internet marketing is not gaining as much attention as previous years, coming in the sixth spot. Also losing heat is webinars; 48% plan on not utilizing them at all this year and 79% plan on keeping the same level or increasing their use of press releases.

There is a lot of useful information to take away from this study, so we want to know where you see the future of social media is heading based on these results?

Make room WebMD as the 100 million monthly US users searching for health related information will now see an up and close search query that focuses on shortening search times for symptom related searches and the possible remedy for their medical condition.

Roni Zeiger, Google’s Chief Health Strategist says the move to a better health search is based on a two or three step process which sees a user search for a specific health symptom, finds a condition, and then begins a new search for that related condition.

To make things easier and less complex, the process of searching for a symptoms-then condition is being simplified into a one step process. The new health search function will feature a small list of conditions that enable you to refine your searching process.

How Will This Affect Your Online Marketing Business

If you are worried about this affecting a ppc agency or internet marketing, Google is assuring us that your campaigns won’t see any negative effects. Zeiger said Google is using this feature pretty conservatively to prevent health searches being spammed with unnecessary or irrelevant heath symptoms. Try this: we did a search for “abdominal pain on my right side”. Here are the results that we can expect on more searches:

• Searches related to abdominal pain on my right side:
• Appendicitis
• Ovarian cyst
• Hernia
• Kidney Stone
• Irritable Bowel

Go ahead and try it and let us know what you think.