Ten Trends to Follow

Nine Ladies Launching Eleven Business Cases

Ten Trends to Follow

This post is in my Twelve Days of Christmas series.

New Year is the time when everyone makes their predictions for the year ahead – and I'm no exception. Here are ten trends I'll be watching this year:

Facebook continues to dominate. In March 2010, Facebook overtook Google in terms of Internet traffic. Goldman Sachs have just invested $1.5bn in a deal that valued Facebook at $50bn and estimated its user base as 600m. Mark Zuckerberg is Time Magazine's Person of The Year, and the rumours about him shutting it down were a hoax. Not going away anytime soon.
Twitter continues to grow. I've been saying 'Twitter is the fastest growing social network" for years. It still is. And they've now stated an aim to reach one billion users by 2013. Hugely ambitious – but possible at current growth rates.
Monetization. Facebook is already monetizing all those users. In 2010 it made $1.86bn from Social Ads. In 2011, look out for Facebook Credits. Twitter will be next to cash in on all those users, and has already started experimenting. This year, look out for promoted accounts, products and trending topics. And 'premium' services for businesses – something that third party apps using the Twitter API are already doing.
Social commerce is the new e-commerce. Not only are the social media sites making money – business are by using them. More people will sell more via social networks. Don't have an e-commerce site? Sell on Facebook Marketplace or enable people to buy from your customized Facebook page. Social commerce has the added advantage of tapping into online reviews and recommendations.
Blogs are the new websites. Why spend time and money creating a static website when you can have a WordPress site up and running in minutes that is better for search engines, easier to update, more professional-looking that you could do yourself – and free? Not just for blogs, more businesses will use WordPress to create their main website in 2011.
Social media becomes more integrated. Do you have your Twitter username on your business card? Can people 'like' your Facebook page direct from your website? Social media will become less of an add-on, and more an integral part of most websites – and offline marketing.
Television plugs into social media. One 'old media' channel that is starting to understand the links between traditional media and social media is television. More TV shows will announce their hashtag in the opening credits, and people will continue to watch TV together on Twitter. Even David Dimbleby has started announcing the #bbcqt hashtag on BBC Question Time. Look out for new TV shows pre-launching on Twitter to build an audience – such as #10oclocklive in the UK.
Location-based marketing struggles to go mainstream. This was one of the big trends last year – social networks like FourSquare that enable you to geotag yourself and let people know where you are. Facebook Places and Twitter locations followed in November 2010, which suggested the trend was going mainstream. I have my doubts. Popular with geeks and useful for some businesses – but it seems too much like electronic tagging to me. Some insurance companies have even suggested that premiums may be raised for people who regularly use location-based services. After all, if you keep telling everyone when you're out of the house, it gets a bit burgleme.com…
Quora. It's like the new Twitter, yeah? Or not. Everyone seems to be joining this at the moment – though users being able to auto-import their friends from Twitter and Facebook is no doubt helping to boost the numbers. It's actually quite different to Twitter – a forum for Q&As. A bit like LinkedIn Answers but kinda Twittery. I'll look at this in more detail in a later post.
Sofalizing is the new socializing. It's also my new favourite word. The word sofalizing was coined in November 2010 by online casino company Yazino, in the context of research commissioned to determine trends in how potential users interact with one another. It means socializing from the comfort of your own sofa on social networks – such as by watching TV together on Twitter. About a quarter of us do it – and it looks set to increase.

What are your online marketing predictions for 2011? Let me know in the comments below.