Here’s a post (with a few additions) that I did earlier this week on the Sysomos blog.
If 2009 was the year that social media established itself, 2010 will be how social media is embraced and leveraged by a growing number of companies. With this in mind, here are some fearless predictions about what’s on the horizon.
1. Social media monitoring and measurement will gain even more traction as companies recognize the importance of listening and understanding what’s happening so they can engage with key influencers and opinion leaders. The social media monitoring market will likely consolidate, and paid tools will attraction more attention as customers upgrade from free tools.
2. Geo-location will become a key trend as more social media users broadcasts their locations, not only to friends, family and colleagues but to retailers as well. This will give businesses the ability to send the right advertising offers to people at the right time and the right place. Look for services such as FourSquare and Twitter to drive the geo-location market.
3. Facebook’s impressive growth (my prediction is 500 million users) will continue but users will have to live with the reality that Facebook wants to make more of its – and your – information public so that more of its content will be monetized. Twitter’s user base will expand as well but not as wildly as 2009. FourSquare and Posterous will remain niche services.
4. Blogs will come back into style as companies realize they’re powerful and effective tools to communicate with customers, potential customers, partners, investors and employees. In 2009, the pendulum swung hard to micro-messaging but expect macro-messaging (aka blogs) to stage a rebound.
5. Video will continue to grow aggressively as more companies realize it’s an effective way to communicate amid a sea of text.
6. Social media will increasingly become an integrated part of more companies’ communications, marketing and sales activities. This trend will be driven by the growing recognition that social media can build new and different relationships with customers and existing customers. As well, the continued economic uncertainly is making social media more attractive due to its low cost.
7. ROI – return on investment – will become a major issue as companies look to measure and justify their social media spending so they can gauge its success, and compare it against other marketing/communications initiatives.
8. The term “social media” will start to disappear as it becomes an established part of the Web’s overall fabric – much like Web 2.0 is used far less often.
Wow. Some real eye-opening insights here. I guess Thought #9: More people will use the Internet to communicate and share information was too obvious. Maybe you should have stuck with Thought #10: Social media consultants will continue to rehash pablum and package it as value-added insight.
Wunderbar,
I never suggested it was value-added insight; just some end of year personal thoughts. In any event, thanks for the comment.
Social media user profiles are based on the user's real life activities/informations?
the web has been a perfect escape for all the people with a less satisfying real life that used to spend a lot of time on virtual networks.
What will happen when people will understand that their "virtual" life gets its sense from the real life activities? if the users will adopt this kind of understanding, i think we'll see faster growth and usage for mobile social networks (anyway mobile has its own rules for each environment).
If the users will continue to invest much of their time publishing and nurturing their personal pages, then the desktop based social networks could grow faster).
I think it's going to be a very exciting year for mobile social media. Thanks for the comment!
Mark
I don't think geo-location will explode in 2010 in terms of its commercial application to businesses. Even though we are starting to see the potential of it with greater user adoption there and acquisitions like GeoAPI by twitter, I think we'll see that ecosystem maturing and growing but not yet monetized in 2010.
However, what I think we'll see is the evolution of new ecommerce models that feed off of the explosive growth we saw in 2009 of social media tools like twitter and facebook. These models will include things like group buying as we can see from groupon's success and others that leverage the viral word of mouth online. I would think that someone like groupon with a smart acquisition could place itself in the race for local location based advertising. They do have the local sales channels and clear value proposition to businesses that others like twitter don't have. Thats my dark horse in the geolocation game in 2010.
What do you think?
I enjoyed reading these predictions & the comments. I also believe that 2010 is going to bring about the biggest transformation in decades in how users decide and how companies market. I also think that powerful search tools like TipTop http://FeelTipTop.com are going to be at the forefront in this coming revolution.
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