Social media trends for 2012
Whereas previous New Year predictions considered social media to be ‘new’ or ‘emerging’, it is now an established ‘part of the furniture’ for brands and businesses.
More than likely, plans for your social media activity will already be in place along with the rest of your digital strategy. Social media is no longer a bolt-on, but one of the most important and valuable methods of communication that you have with your customers and supporters.
Social media for small businesses
In light of this, 2012 will be a big year for small businesses in social media. People will be seeking out all businesses on Facebook and Twitter, not just the big brands that have dominated social media platforms in recent times.
One of the reasons is that small businesses are able to carve out niche communities and communicate to their customers in a unique way through social media. Investment in this area can help small businesses to achieve key goals such as increase web traffic, increase footfall or increase sales.
But perhaps most important of all, social media can be used as an effective customer services tool; as a method for getting across the personality of the brand; and as a platform to provide a ‘small business’ feel online.
What’s next in social?
In early 2012, Facebook will hit one billion users. With this, it becomes clear that Facebook is by far the social media powerhouse.
It’s important not to get too carried away trying to predict what the ‘next big social network’ of 2012 will be. If the likes of Google+ or any other social network does take off and become bigger than Facebook or Twitter, then great; you can take your time, work out if this is the right network for you and then plan a strategy to best achieve your goals on that platform.
However, spending time trying to predict what’s next can take valuable time away from working out how to use your existing networks to their full potential.
There will be a great deal of potential for business to optimise their existing platforms in 2012. Twitter has recently announced its redesign for brand pages and Facebook appears likely to launch more features for brands this year, hinting at streamlined pages to fit with the new timeline seen on individual profiles.
In many ways, it is most important to keep an eye on how you can maximise and profit from the existing fan bases that you have amassed rather than trying to spread yourself too thinly across all of the social media channels. This is will allow you to be more relevant or and achieve better return on investment.
If you want to see strong ROI, a focussed strategy is vital. Fan numbers cannot be your only goal – work out what you want to achieve and then choose the appropriate platform for this, rather than starting with the platform and working backwards. The old mantra of ‘be everywhere’ will quickly be replaced with ‘be where it matters to your business.’
Big winners for 2012
So who will benefit most from social media in 2012? As discussed above, it is vital that small businesses maximise the opportunities available to them through social media. However, my prediction for the big winners of 2012 in social media is newspapers – in particular local newspapers.
Local news is struggling in the recession and the elevation of digital has meant that newspaper sales are suffering, so unless news publishers embrace digital trends and keep ahead in social media they are at risk of missing out greatly.
Social media is where people share news daily. The introduction of the news readers on Facebook, where articles read by users are posted into their news feed, has allowed newspapers to take ownership of the articles as they are shared.
Yet the newspapers’ individual Twitter and Facebook pages still need to be invested in. In order to generate revenue, a key focus for these channels has to be to make sure that traffic is driven back to the newspaper websites.
Posting constant links to news articles isn’t necessarily going to do this; instead social media must be used as a tool to provide more interactive and innovative reporting techniques, such as live updates from court or tweeting live from a world events, etc. These can ultimately drive people back to the website for the full story.
With investment and a clear strategy, social media could be the change that newspapers need to take news to the next level and embrace the digital news era.
Nicola Peate, social media manager, Rippleffect
