2012 gave us the ability to establish social media foundations to better position us for online marketing efforts. Many companies (certainly not enough, however) have created a Facebook Page, Twitter Account, LinkedIn Profiles and even Pinterest accounts.

Up until now, these social platforms have worked very nicely, independent of each other.

As online technology continues to grow and expand, we expect these independent social networking platforms to begin working more closely with each other – integrating social media behaviors and data into the rest of the marketing mix to further help reach customers with highly contextual, highly relevant messages in near real-time.

The fascination with social media, and the fad mentality that goes along with it will turn more strategic for companies looking to further develop their inbound marketing efforts.

Syncing social media activities with contact databases will result in more data available to use in behavioral marketing leading to better segmenting of marketing messages and calls to action and ultimately to an increase in customer conversion rates.