2013 Social Media Trends by Our London Digital Agency – Part 1

2012 has certainly been an exciting year in the social media sphere for all digital agencies. With Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest taking most of the headlines, it is important to note that there were other sites such as Instagram that gained strong recognition as well.

The key for all us marketers is what will be the site to bet on in 2013?

We have analysed what worked in 2012 in great detail and this has helped us create our 3 part series for trends and tips for social media strategies in 2013.

Social – A Must Factor

2011 and perhaps to a slightly lesser extent 2012 , witnessed many businesses going online and developing websites, but still not many businesses embraced social media’s potential completely. It is true that 2012 saw many businesses create Facebook pages and Twitter profiles but many of them did just that, create profiles!

In terms of demand, our agency experts have witnessed an exponential growth of the social media value added service aggregators. Social Analytics and social CRM will continue gaining more and more space on the learning cycles of digital agencies and experts. Connected devices will keep driving attention of CMO’s and Digital Agencies even in 2013 where retail chains will strive to publish more location based mobile applications.

In 2013, our London digital agency experts expect many more businesses to realise the benefits of social media and create proper strategies. We honestly believe it’s now fair to say that Social media will no longer be a choice but will become an integral part of most businesses.

PPC – Moving from Paid Search Ads to Paid Social Ads

While PPC search ads will still remain popular, the trend for 2013 will be for some of the Google PPC budget to move towards social media Ads. This will definitely get Google thinking more about Google plus and how they can use it to combat the threat from Facebook, Twitter and others.

Facebook Also Getting Into Search

With 800 million active users on Facebook at the moment, it will not be a surprise if the number crosses 1 billion in 2013. Facebook recently came up with the idea of Facebook Gifts which is going to have an impact on how we see e-commerce today. There are rumours flying around that Facebook will move into social search soon and that they are in line to make their own search engine to compete directly with Google. To counter this argument a little, 2012 also saw many users getting bored with Facebook and less frequent logging ins. So, Facebook needs to come up with innovative ideas to keep their users active on Facebook regularly as well.  The battle ground has most certainly been set.

Social Data Warehouse

Right now most of us use search engines for gathering our data. However, we believe that 2013 will transform the way we search, with increasing number of users switching to social media sites to search for their information. Search engines do not update their index as quickly as social networking sites and so the information on these social sites could be more relevant.

However, the key for all social sites would be to see how these sites are able to help users search and still maintain privacy of users which Google has failed to do so till now.

Social News Channels

In 2012 we saw that latest events and news posted on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, circulated at amazing speeds. The social media sites report news faster than any news portals can possible even dream of. You are tweeting and suddenly the trending events change to reflect the latest news. You will instantly know about it. 2013, will see this trend rising with users sharing, reporting and reading news on social media channels rather than news portals online.

That’s from our side for trends, but please do share with us what you believe would be the trends for 2013 for the social media sphere. Keep watching this space as we will be posting our part-2 soon.