Social media marketing continued to make significant headway in 2011 and is expected to move full steam ahead in 2012. More specifically, what trends can we expect to see in the coming year? Six marketing pros share their insights.

Joining us in this post are Sergio Balegno, Shama Kabani, Cindy King, Joe Pulizzi, Mike Volpe and our very own, Julie Diaz-Asper. After you’ve had a chance to read their predictions please take a moment and share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

Best wishes for a productive, profitable and social 2012!

Sergio Balegno

Advancing to the strategic phase of social marketing maturity means having a formal process with thorough guidelines you routinely perform to plan, execute and measure the performance of social media programs. In 2011, we found that 19% of organizations had reached this strategic phase and nearly half of those (47%) reported that their social marketing efforts produced measurable ROI. 2012 is expected to be a turning point for many more marketers who will finally rank the financial return on their social marketing investment alongside more established online marketing practices like email and search.

Sergio Balegno, @SergioBalegno, Director of Research at MECLABS Primary Research Group/MarketingSherpa.

Shama Hyder Kabani

One trend I see for 2012 in social media and technology is content aggregation and curation. We’ve gone from being an information hungry society to an information overloaded society. Tweets, updates, posts, images, documents, new platforms…it is truly mind boggling. So, in 2012, I think we will see a rise in tools, platforms, theories, and more which allows us to only find relevant and timely information. Search Engine Optimization and search engines themselves will play a huge role in this curation. While content has always been important, now, it won’t be just the content creators –but the aggregators who will also be respected. We will also see a rise in social networks which help people curate –such as Pinterest.

Shama Hyder Kabani, @Shama, CEO of the Marketing Zen Group, and author of The Zen of Social Media Marketing.

Cindy King

2012 will see more businesses understanding how to use social media to connect with their customers. Businesses will see the bigger picture thanks to diverse online trends such as mobile marketing, gamification and social sharing, and work towards integrating these new communication tools into their overall communication and marketing strategies.

Cindy King, @CindyKing, is an international business consultant at CindyKing.biz & managing editor at Social Media Examiner.

Joe Pulizzi

In 2012, Google will become one of the largest publishers on the planet, buying more and more niche media companies in a variety of markets.  This means that companies should be even more concerned with creating passionate subscribers to their own content, just in case Google decides to corner the market at some point in the future.

Joe Pulizzi, @juntajoe, is the Founder of the Content Marketing Institute and co-author of Managing Content Marketing.

Mike Volpe

I think the obsession and infatuation with ‘social media’ will wear off and people will get back to business.  This means that companies will start to think more about how to integrate social media into the rest of their company, not think about how it is some new and weird thing that needs special treatment.  This means that social will be combined with content marketing, email marketing, and conversion marketing as part of an overall inbound marketing strategy.

As part of this integration, the role of the community manager or social media specialist will merge into the rest of the marketing team.  Everyone should be incorporating social into all of their inbound marketing, not having one person work in isolation on social media.

Finally, I hope that marketers get back to basics and start to measure the ROI of each part of their marketing and make decisions using data, not just emotion. We have given social media a hall pass on ROI and metrics for too long, it is not hard to measure the business impact of social media as part of inbound marketing.  I really hope more marketers start to do measurement right in 2012.

Mike Volpe, @mvolpe, is the CMO at HubSpot.

Julie Diaz-Asper

I think branded Facebook app development will move toward more robust applications that help consumers find, shop and share. The Walmart gift app is one example.

I predict Google will use mobile to make major inroads against Facebook in 2012. The fact that applications (aka contest, games , etc) on Facebook are not mobile enabled is one of Facebook’s biggest vulnerabilities. Google is in a good position to take advantage of that.

I think we will see more product marketing teams getting involved in social media at a product level–specific product marketing efforts, more call-to-actions and promotion focused campaigns. As a result, there will be a bigger focus on driving sales and improving the customer experience via social media.

Julie Diaz-Asper, @JulieDiazAsper, is the CEO at GigCoin.

What are your predictions for social media marketing in 2012?