My reaction: social marketing trends of 2014

In the Forbes article The Top 7 Social Media Trends That Will Dominate 2014, the author Jayson DeMers sets up - you guessed it - 7 trends for the future. This is my reaction.

First, the author's trends:

1. Investment in social media will be a necessity, not a luxury
2. The rise of Google+
3. The rise of image-centric networks 
4. The rise of micro-video 
5. Foursquare will decline sharply
6. MySpace will grow
7. LinkedIn will be a huge B2B biz player

My initial reaction is that this is pretty spot-on. I think all are relevant, with the exception of Foursquare (I thought it already died?), and I think most of them are spot-on. 

I think that the most interesting part of all of this is that some bigger social networks – Google+, LinkedIn, and MySpace – are all carving out chunks of Facebook’s once-dominant market. I’ve written in this blog before about how I think Facebook is waning anyway, and from what I see here, I feel even stronger about that.

The re-branded MySpace

Take MySpace for example. One of the coolest things about MySpace back in the day is that there were a lot of bands on there, and you could listen to samples. Just looking at the re-branded MySpace’s front page, you get the feeling that they’re going back to that “artists first” type of thinking, which is a pretty smart play, I think. 

LinkedIn... Wow. I really agree with the growth projections there. The Influencers is a great addition, they do job postings, and now they also have University pages. While these Uni pages aren't perfect just yet, the feature will only get better and better. 

Rounding the "bigger" networks out is Google+. Everyone has Gmail, Google Drive is an amazing tool, so it just makes sense that everyone will be on Google+. Unlike LinkedIn, which takes the professional chunk of life, or MySpace, which looks like it's taking the artistic chunk, Google+ is pretty much an out-and-out direct Facebook competitor. While I really prefer Google+, I still don't use it, nor do I really know how to use it. I still think that Facebook is king, and while G+ is on the rise, I think that it might take a while before/if it eclipses Facebook. (or maybe I have it all wrong, and G+ gives us something totally different from Facebook. I'm not quite sure yet.)

Now for the 'smaller' trends, or trends-within-a-trend if you will... IMAGES and VIDEO. I completely agree with the author that these are growing and will continue to be huge. I think a lot of the rise has to do with the faster internet speeds. The trend has gone from long-form text blogs, to short "top-5" blogs, to microblogging and twitter, then to pictures and blogs, and now to pictures and video only. It totally goes with the shrinking attention span of the modern internet consumer, as well as faster internet speeds enabling videos to be shared that much more easily. 

I'd put money down on each of these trends to come to fruition in 2014.