It is likely to come as little surprise that marketers are still finding inbound marketing lead sources increasingly important in their business. It certainly makes sense. SO much so that you don’t really think about it and the implications. That is until you read something like HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing 2012. You can download the full report here.

The report is literally chock full of data so I pulled just two pieces that show the real impact of inbound marketing on lead generation.

Of course when you see information like that you have to assume that the converse is valid as well and in this case it appears to be so as well.

Twitter has been working up to its more broadly offered self serve ad platform for a while now. To this point, there are about 100 advertisers that have been allowed to use the system but Twitter is about to expand that capability significantly as it looks to make 2012 a big year. This strategy is part of a larger plan for the social media company to reach the election year groups and international advertisers as well. It’s starting to look like Twitter plans to make some money.

AdAge reports

You probably realize by now I am a research skeptic in most instances. I am what many call a “high skeptic”. All that means is that I come at these things form the angle that researchers will have to prove to me that they are genuine rather than the opposite approach which would be to just accept research as real just because it is research.

So when I saw the chart below from research conducted by ClearSaleing and reported by eMarketer I had a few thoughts.

The premise is that in a multi-channel approach the impact of social media is that people spend more, on average, when social media is part of that process.

There are still a lot of businesses that conduct business as usual. They produce products as they always have (with updates here and there). They market their products the same way. They adopt the attitude that many failing organizations do which is “Well, we have always done it this way.”

Well, needless to say the emphasis on companies using that attitude would be on the wordfailing. Nothing is the same as it used to be. Sure there are things that marketers have always done and are still effective. Many big brands, for instance, still like to buy TV spots like they always have and have benefited from technology to help better understand the impact of that ad.

Where the “magic happens” (yes, I hate that phrase too but I went there) is when marketers truly align with their target’s behaviors. Look at this chart from data put together by Yahoo and Razorfish as reported by eMarketer.

This guest blog post comes via HubSpot. It is written by Donald Nosek, VP of Strategy for ymarketing, a data-driven, digital marketing agency specializing in inbound marketing, and a VAR for HubSpot.

So what can the greatest outbound marketing event of the year teach inbound marketers? As we did last year, we’ve looked at key social media markers (http://www.ymarketing.com/2012-Super-Bowl-Social-Brand-Scoreboard-Rep ort) to determine what impact Super Bowl commercials have on the social media efforts of the brands who advertised.

What makes the following five lessons significant to inbound marketers is that the conclusions are statistically based.

The following post comes from our Inbound Marketing Channel sponsor HubSpot.

The FBI recently posted a Request for Information (RFI) for a “social media application.” But, it was really a request for a social media monitoring application. Why? Because the FBI recognizes what many inbound marketers already know and many others are discovering: There’s gold in them thar social media data.

You can use the same social media monitoring attributes the FBI wants to use to catch bad guys to generate and nurture leads, identify hot spots (good and bad), and close more deals.

We all want more clicks. We all want a magic formula to get clicks. We also all know (at least those who are firmly planted in reality) that there is no such beast.

There is, however, research that is being done all the time to help give some guidance regarding how to best navigate the emerging social media marketing landscape. One person who does a lot of this research, especially around Twitter, is HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella. His latest look into the world of Twitter and how you might be able to optimize your efforts on the social network looks at some of the variables that go into generating more clicks on Twitter.

Take a look at this infographic that examines insights gleaned from Zarrella’s research. Have you found similar experiences in using Twitter? Do you have your own “secret sauce”? Care to share?