Recently, I wrote about the dangers of trusting the wrong, essentially superficial, metrics when diagnosing your social media strategy. Today, let’s talk specifically about the great battle of social media vs. email marketing.

Errol Apostolopoulos reports for BostInno that “unique impressions delivered via Facebook’s sponsored posts average out to be 18x more cost-effective than those delivered via traditional email acquisition methods.” When you add in that you can use standard posts to reach a wider, if less concentrated, audience, Facebook, and other social media sites, really set themselves apart. 

Does this mean you should completely forsake your old pal email marketing? Heck no. It still has an important role to play. Pairing email and social media can lower your cost per acquisition on both platforms. 

INFOGRAPHIC

In 2012, even nonprofits were utilizing social media. MDG Advertising looked into this developing trend and found that the inclusion of social media marketing meant more exposure and more donations for these organizations, as reported by The Huffington Post.

The innovation of ‘Giving Tuesday’, which grew over social media, is a glowing example of what is possible when online marketing is utilized properly. The model used by nonprofits is not revolutionary. Rather, it is simply a testament to why putting the time and effort into social media marketing is necessary.

While you browse the included infographic, think about how you can increase your conversions through a better social media strategy.

As with any business, you not only need to keep up with current trends and updates in online marketing, but you also need to be looking ahead to attempt to predict some of the changes ahead.

To help with this task, Business2Community presents their predictions for the 2013 landscape of social media and search engine marketing. If you’ve stayed current with the trends of the past year, there aren’t any big surprises here. But, it’s nice to see a succinct list of things to keep an eye out for in the coming year.

If you’re like me, you do as much of your holiday shopping online as possible. Juding by statistics, there are plenty of people out there like me. Google searches for retail products jump up as much as 500-percent during December.

Conversely, the service industry sees a major dip in activity through the holidays. Obviously, December is a different landscape than the other 11-months and what was previously working for your business may need to be tweaked for the holidays.

Jeremy Decker, of Search Engine Journal, has some suggestions to make the most of this changing terrain. By pulling the right strings, you can have a very, merry holiday season.

The reality of online marketing is that advertisers must find a way to reach users on a variety of different devices. AdWords recently made that difficult task a little easier with a new tool that allows you to convert ads using Flash to HTML5.

Since many tablets do not support Flash, this tool could help your business reach thousands of additional users. And converting takes just a couple of mouse clicks, no expert knowledge is needed.

To find out more, check out Chris Crum’s article at Web Pro News.

It’s easy to get caught taking metrics at face value and not really interpreting what they mean. Benny Blum, for Search Engine Land, makes a valuable point about how time affects how you value your channels’ performances. You have to be wary of making changes too soon and effectively destroying what would have eventually been a great platform.

Obviously, there are difficult choices to make about where to allocate your ad budget across options like PPC, email, social media and organic search. However, if you looking at your click and conversion rates over an optimal amount of time, you might be overreacting to perceived underperformance.

Google is offering up to two months of free advertising, or up to a $250 total value, for signing up for AdWords Express before December 16th. Most likely, you’ve received emails, possibly many, informing you of the promotion but it might be worth looking into for small business owners.

Find out more from Peter Kafka’s article at All Things D.

For anyone using online advertising, the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend is a great opportunity to see a spike in your ads’ views. Search Engine Roundtable reports, however, that a “technical issue” on some AdWords accounts caused ads not to show over perhaps the biggest online shopping weekend of the year.

No word yet on the official cause of the problem or how Google plans to deal with the backlash. I think I would want to be compensated in some way for the inconvenience and possible loss of business. Wouldn’t you?

To perform well in online marketing, you have to use Google. AdWords is far and away the best option available and you’re handicapping your efforts if you’re not using it. Unfortunately, Google understands this fact also. This means that as more and more advertisers rely on AdWords, Google can bleed more and more money from their budgets.

Joel Chudleigh has an in-depth look at the various ways Google encourages you to spend more for online advertising at Business2Community, but I’ll give you a quick synopsis.

Basically, Google has been able to develop innovative new ways for your ad to get noticed and ways for you to track how well your campaigns are performing, but has included in this innovations an urging to spend more to get more. This is not an indictment of Google, but rather a statement of fact.

Of course Google will readily show you click-through and conversion rates of ads that display at the top of search results as compared to your ads because they want you to bid up to capture those top spots. That’s just one example of AdWords’ service subtly prompting you to feed more into your ad budget.

Google has cleverly created a competitive landscape for advertisers where the highest bid receives the most views and clicks. For advertisers, there’s no choice but to play along.

You can never stop learning when it comes to online marketing. Google’s Display Network is constantly being updated and you have to stay current in order to best utilize the tools at your disposal.

To help you do just that, check out Matt Van Wagner’s column at SearchEngineLand. He’s got the rundown of the latest updates and how they can help you.