5 social media trends to keep an eye on right now

We are starting to se a decreasing hype for social media. It is not news anymore and the big question now is not if companies should start using Twitter and Facebook or not, the question is rather How to work with the channels and what strategic manner to use.

When in the middle of a developing work it is easy to just focus on the moment and forget about the following steps that are about to come. Therefor we would like to stress some trends, worth keeping an eye on.

1. Location

Now you can tag you geographic position in Twitter-posts and Facebook recently announced that they also will support location based information in posts. This kind of feature will grow and the supply of services based on this technique is about to explore the market. This is only the beginning of a great journey of check ins, badges and mayors.

2. Mobile ads

To be able to reach potential customers right before the decision of purchase is a dream for many of us. With the techniques of geo location and ad systems like AdMob and iAd it is only a question of time before mobile advertising will conquer ad land.

3. Mobile payments

In Sweden it is still a quite new type of service, we have seen it on wending machines from Selecta “Pay by texting…” and that is only the beginning of what will come. A range of actors in financials like Visa has worked with the development of a mobile pay system for quite a while now and Paypal already have an app that works for micro payments. Soon we will be able to make even bigger payments with our smart phones.

4. Collective offers and benefits

Groupon is a new type of service that allows users to group in order to receive offers and benefits from local vendors. The service is localization based and the offers activates when a certain number of members from the same area checks in during a certain period of time.

5. Social media policy

As more and more companies dive head first down into the social media pool, the more commonplace it have become to have a strategic policy for how to use social media. In some cases though it could be good to think about what strategies to use out there and not only think about being present but to really take use of the present in a strategic way.