Futurity Media

So how did social media fare in 2009, and what can we look forward to in 2010? If Facebook could be considered a bell-weather for social media, then 2009 was an important year, because it broke through 300 million users and became cash-flow positive for the first time. Although this of course doesn’t mean that it is profitable – yet.

Analyst Gartner reckons that Facebook will actually strengthen its position in the future, because it will help different social networks operate with mechanisms such as Facebook Connect. In fact, Gartner believes that interoperability will be the most important trend in social networks over the next two years.

All business sectors embraced social media in 2009. Look at newspapers; criticised by Gartner in early 2009, the vast majority of newspaper sites now have social media widgets to help their readers share information. The Telegraph, for example, has a ‘retweet’ button, which handily counts the number of times readers have retweeted its articles.

Away from the mainstream, social media turned up in all sorts of places. It aimed to stop the spread of swine flu, got jurors into trouble in court and even saw an innocent man hauled down the police station to be questioned about terrorism offenses.

So what for next year? Well Forrester’s Josh Bernoff believes that 2010 is the year when marketers will focus less on fuzzy social media metrics and look for proper measureable marketing metrics. Getting followers and friends is all very well, but if businesses don’t use these networks or connections for any obvious end, then the money is wasted. In fact it can be counterproductive if the connections get bored or disillusioned with the enterprise’s business.

What do you think?

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