LinkedIn to your Facebook lately or are you bored of being a digital twit? Have we all become antisocial about social media sites or do they still have something to offer us? Ok, so you don’t look up as many random school friends as you did this time last year. And telling people what you’re up to right this second might have lost its appeal after Stephen Fry got too busy to “follow” you. But we’d argue social media still has a lot of untapped potential to offer, especially for the B2B sector.

There are two sides to every conversation but at the moment, most of what we do on social networking sites seem to be talking to the vast thin air of cyberspace. Here’s my top trends emerging from social media that will blow away the binary tumbleweeds and get social media working…

Social Customer Service

Q: What’s the difference between your customers and people on social media sites?

A: Absolutely nothing

Let’s face it, if you’re part of any sizable company, there’ll be a Facebook group that complains about your services before there’ll be one praising you. There’s an old adage that states stories of good customer service are passed on to three other people while bad experiences are told to at least eight eager listeners. But on the internet, you can use this to your advantage.

Frank Eliason of US cable provider Comcast did a Twitter search for all tweets mentioning “Comcast and (because he was a realist) “Comcrap.” What he found was not all pleasant. What he did was respond to each complaint with a friendly offer of help.

Why wait until your customers bring their complaints to you, via a three-minute automated phone system? Social Media and site monitoring tools can tell you exactly where they are, and how they feel about you.

Social Sharing

Who wants to add Peanut M&Ms or a Fiat Punto to their list of Facebook friends? No? All too often companies think that merely being on social media should be enough to get the customers rolling in. Not so fast. Just like paying for print and digital adspace, companies have to earn their place in social media. But the way to do it is through value-added content. Sharing a little knowledge is a wonderful thing.

Just check out TED Talks  – a collection of video lectures from TED, the academic organisation owned by the Sapling Group. Originally focused on technology, these talks now cover everything from innovation to arts, politics and culture. TED talks have been viewed more than 100 million times and its 15 million-h3 fanbase is growing. Fast. Sharing good ideas – what a good idea?

Social Statistics

We could also call this social spying. You can monitor online customer behaviour with more accuracy than MI5 these days. Online marketing firms using software such as Omniture or Google Analytics can track where people have come from, how long they spend on each part of your webpage and how they use supporting material such as downloads.

Armed with information like this, you can now build up a more detailed picture than ever of your customer’s online and offline profile – and where the two are linked.

Social Interactions

Social success is no longer measured by the amount of visitors you have, but the quality of their visit. Digitally speaking, the online event you’re after is more of a quiet, in-depth shindig with David Attenborough, Damon Albarn and Kate Winslet. As opposed to a 10th anniversary Big Brother reunion party at Reflex. So how do you get quality visitors to your online social space?

Social interactions not only allow you to map a visitors’ experience on your site but importantly can create content and provide valuable data. The trick is having the insights on your audience to be able to inspire them to interact.