Social Media Predictions For 2012

With 2011 behind us and 2012 before us, there are some undercurrents and breaking trends in social media that are sure to change the landscape of social networks in a big way.

These are my carefully considered predictions for what will happen in the social media landscape in the coming year.

(Please ignore this rather pointless image I put in here to fill the featured image box requirement on the homepage!)

Social networks will be about more than just text, and real-world interaction will matter more.

Networks like Pinterest, Instagram, Path, Tout, and many new others we haven’t yet seen will make Facebook and Twitter look more and more tired. Networks will need to be directly involved with the real world lives of you and those you care about in order to matter as much as they used to. People will become increasingly open to new networks as Facebook becomes old hat.

Privacy concerns will continue to escalate, potentially hurting Facebook in a meaningful way.

Facebook has become more and more lax with their users’ privacy. They have become more and more greedy and careless as they play to the corporate interests of their advertisers at the expense of their users’ privacy. Users are beginning to care more, and may increasingly begin to prefer networks who don’t sell them to advertisers like a cheap product to be hawked to the lowest bidder.

Google+ will continue to rise in popularity, experiencing exponential growth to become a serious rival to Facebook by years’ end.

Analysts and data have shown that Google+ is growing at an astonishing rate. If it can sustain anywhere near its current rate, it will have a network with hundreds of millions of users by this time next year, making the numbers advantage of Facebook all but disappear. This will remove the primary reason most people are on Facebook (it’s the only network their non-tech savvy friends are on), which will in turn take more people away from Facebook and toward Google+.

People will begin to crave meaningful, deep relationships again, and shallow “friend counts” will matter less and less.

This will apply across the board. As the novelty of having a thousand or more friends that you don’t actually know wears off, people will realize that they don’t have any real relationships with these people and will begin to crave relationships that actually have two-way interaction and more meaning and progress. Expect to see a lot of “spring friend cleaning” and the like, as people rapidly (or gradually) unfriend the people and brands who don’t foster relationships well on social media.

People will get less and less tolerant of “pushing” and “promoting” by marketers and brands.

If a company only “pushes” media and information out instead of engaging one-to-one with its customers, customers will become less and less tolerant of this behavior and just break their connection with the brand for good.

Gary Vaynerchuck’s advice will become more and more important to follow, as customers get sick and tired of the fake relationships and false engagement of companies and brands, and actively seek out companies with real values and real relationships. That deep, transparent knowledge of and relationship with your customer that mom and pop general stores of yesteryear had will become something that’s expected of brands on the web today.

Video will get better and better, and will become increasingly dominant and popular.

With today’s iPhones, Android devices, point-and-shoot cameras, and DSLRs able to produce gorgeous, crisp 1080P HD video, high-quality video will go mainstream in a huge way. People will begin to expect great quality from their video, and the current tolerance people have for low-grade video “because it’s just on YouTube” will disappear.

Social video networks like YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, and others will continue to rise in popularity, and will experience exponential growth as YouTube and other social video integration comes standard on nearly every HDTV sold this year. YouTube will increasingly be something watched on big-screen HDTVs in the living room, and not just a fun thing to do on mobile devices and computers.

Mobile-first social networks will become popular, and may begin to replace web-first networks.

The social networks of yesteryear were created and designed to be used on desktop computers and laptops, in a full-sized web browser window. These networks have all adapted and released mobile apps to grant users access to their content on their mobile devices.

New networks will arise that don’t even have web browser access to their content. These networks will only exist as mobile applications, making the mobile experience the only experience. Expect to see this trend in other areas as well, with increasingly powerful and dominant mobile apps taking the place of both web apps and desktop apps.

Social networks will be used to solve problems and not merely entertain.

Social networks are an insanely powerful thing. Right now, they are primarily used to entertain.

We have scores of real-world problems that could be solved with social media that aren’t being addressed. That needs to change, now. Perhaps this is more of a call to action than a prediction, but it is increasingly likely that bright entrepreneurs and big-minded people will rise to the challenges faced today and create social networks to solve the problems of finding a job, staffing a new company, finding work for freelancers, rallying behind social causes and charities, and tackling real world problems through team work and coordinated effort.

Disaster response and aid will also become increasingly coordinated through mobile social networks, as people realize they have access to endless amours of data, resources, and information, right from their smartphones.

Political activism may take on new forms as well as social media is used to coordinate massive national and even global campaigns to change the world, get laws passed and new people elected to office… which brings us to our next prediction.

Political campaigns will rely increasingly on social media in a big way.

The presidential campaigns of 2008 were interesting in that they used social media to rally the support of young people and empower grassroots supporters to take action.

However, it has been increasingly noted that those campaigns really only used social networks to gain the “approval” of younger audiences, and to make people “feel” empowered. Those sorts of cop-outs and half-measures will not work in the upcoming electoral battles. If a candidate is to be taken seriously and gain real traction in the coming elections, he or she needs to take social media very seriously and have a very bulletproof, aggressive strategy. Having a well-coordinated, active team of volunteers and staffers who are extremely competent and skilled in the use of social networks to impact meaningful change will become vital to the success of future and present political campaigns.

Due to increasing saturation in the more popular networks, enterprising candidates and their supporters will take to the less known networks in order to seek out people who have not been impacted by the other candidates. We’ll begin to see more and more creative campaigns as these candidates seek out more and more ways to reach out to their supporters and rally them to their cause.

In Closing

Were I a betting person, I would bet on each and every one of these predictions. These predictions aren’t shots in the dark or blind guesses, but rather educated predictions based on careful analysis and insight into the current undercurrents and breaking trends in social media. It will be exciting to see how all of this pans out this year. It’s going to be a great year for social.