5 social media trends in 2009

Here are some of the social media trends that are taking place in 2009.

Illustration: Matt Hamm

• Subscribe to our feed

What will happen in the social media during this year? A number of bloggers have tried to identify the most important trends. This is an attempt to summarize some of them. Many more could – and probably should – have been mentioned.

1. Social networks are integrating with each other

Users are getting tired of registering for and maintaining profiles on numerous social communities.  They want to migrate their profile from one network unto another.  And they are right: Why should we need to upload the same profile photo again and again?

We have seen a number of efforts to bring the social networks together, including OpenID, Google’s OpenSocial and Facebook Connect.  In addition there are services like FriendFind aggregating all your activities on different platforms.

This trend will be much stronger in 2009.  Large as well as small players will realize they cannot operate in isolation from other social networks. Rather they will join the efforts to connect the networks to make it easier for the users, creating a portable social graph.

2. More people build their online personal brand

The size and quality of your social network matters – and is an integrated part of building a personal brand. Social communities offer users tools to create a powerful network. More people will invest time in building this network, both in number and quality of connections. This will largely take place independently from employers; in fact many will develop a professional authority through blogging and twittering which will offer them new opportunities with competing employers.

3. Social networks will gain momentum as marketing tool

In fact, consumers will demand corporate social media presence.  Successful companies will Twitter, keep professional blogs, maintain fan pages on Facebook, upload videos of their products on YouTube or otherwise use viral marketing to reach out their customers wherever they decide to spend their time.

4. More tools will help users to avoid information overload

You are following 1378 people on Twitter, have 356 friends on Facebook and connect to 76 other people on Flickr.  So how do you keep up with it? The information flow is just overwhelming. We need help! And we will get it. We will see a number of news tools making it easier to manage all the information.

ReadWriteWeb gives some examples of tools: Google Reader Add-inn, auto-categorization tools, more friend synchronization tools and friend lists sanitizers.

5. More social networking will go mobile

Most large social networks provide a mobile version. Yet 2009 might be the first year using the mobile phone for social networking really take hold.  Probably we will see some popular and neat applications spreading quickly.

• Subscribe to our feed

Additional reading:

• “Social Media Trends 2009″ from TrendsSpotting
• “5 Meta Trends Shaping 2009 Social Media Predictions” from Criskenton
• “Six Social Media Predictions for 2009″ from Spinfield.
• “7 Social Media Predictions” from Socialnomics
• “Yet Another 2009 Social Media Trends List” from Speak Media Blog
• “5 International Social Networks to Keep an Eye on” from CNET

Related posts:

1. 8 digital media trends to watch in 2010
2. Three-year-trend: Newspaper sites falling, social media rising
3. The latest numbers on social networks usage
4. The top 5 web trends in 2009

Tagged as: Facebook, Google, social media, trends, Twitter, web, YouTube