4 Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2011

This article first appeared on MASHABLE.

Tim Ferriss is an angel investor (Twitter, StumbleUpon, Evernote, etc.) and author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Workweek. In his spare time, Tim has doctors stab pen-sized needles into his thighs.

Ah, social media marketing. Fewer things are so lavishly spent on, yet so poorly measured.

Here are a few predictions for 2011 related to where the smart money and dumb money will go. Special thanks to a number of high-volume retail experts for their insights, including Ryan Holiday, director of marketing at American Apparel.

Read on for our predictions and let us know in the comments what you think social media marketing will look like in the year to come.

1. YouTube Beats Yahoo — Video Will Convert

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the English-speaking world.

That’s right: YouTube is bigger than Yahoo. Zappos, as one example, added simple videos of people holding shoes and moving them around to its sales pages and increased conversion rate from 6% to 30%. When I look at the traffic sources for my book trailer on YouTube, the biggest referrer isn’t my own blog. It’s The Huffington Post. I customized the video and text content to a niche (but sizeable) outlet that didn’t exist two years ago:Huffington Post Books.

With proper targeting and syndication, this 50 second video almost immediately propelled my book from an Amazon rank of approximately number 150 to 30, now stabilizing at number four in all books. We usedRankForest to track this sudden change.