Over the last year, the ‘newest kid on the block’, namely social media, has gone through some serious changes. Where we began with the veterans of the social media world, Facebook and Twitter being the main contenders, we now have a large range of social networks dealing with the whole spectrum of friends, like minded acquaintances, posts, hangouts, images, music and film/animated gifs but most importantly, sharing.
Pinterest and Instagram were the biggest stories of the year in 2012, seeing us choose to share images with friends and followers. Pinterest has become the most successful ecommerce referrer of all the social networks, with brands quickly seeing results from their pins surpass those from Facebook. Instagram went through a much reported acquisition by Facebook and has appeared in the marketing press since its controversial update of the sites terms and conditions followed by a quick reverse on the policy rewording.
The ‘bigger brothers’ of the social world have seen a huge shake up of market share in 2012 and coming into 2013, with increased competition and a new approach to sharing content. Facebook is still well in the lead with a solid 700 million users but critics of Google’s social network, Google+, have definitely been proved wrong with new figures released showing it to be the second largest network and boasting a 343 million monthly user count.
The effect of ‘content marketing’ – the buzz word which encompasses the creation and sharing of content, on the way marketers and consumers use social media has seen the channel develop and mature. With the entry of more image based networks to the scene, infographics have become an extremely popular way of telling a story, designed to be ‘pinned’ and shared. We are now able to digest graphic information more readily than before. Econsultancy’s round up of the best infographics in 2012 included an estimate that they had received around 700,000 last year alone!
The entry of these new networks and the changing way of consuming and sharing information has seen networks begin to change their ‘norm’. Linkedin has become much more of a content sharing network over the last few months, eventually retiring their ‘Answers’ feature and declaring a strategic focus on releasing more engaging ways to share content across the network, using Groups and multimedia posts. Twitter also released a ‘filter’ feature for photos in December 2012, rivalling Instagram’s offering and encouraging their users to stay within the Twitter system.
It looks like 2013 will be all about what TechCrunch has dubbed the ‘Photo-Sharing Wars’. The main players in this new arena are Cinemagram and Vine, both launched within the last year and Vine being the newest video/animated gif sharing network to the plate after its launch in January 2013. For those that haven’t heard of these newer social networks, here is a very brief ‘How it works’ based on Cinemagram’s updates to rival the entrance of Vine to the market. There are a lot of articles about these rivals and the pros and cons of each pitted against the other but I really wanted to share the ones which I found most useful. An article on the Twitter Bloggers site lists a concise ’10 Ways Cinemagram Trumps Vine’. These are really interesting and seem to pitch Cinemagram as the more versatile and widely integrated app. However if you read about the statistics which PeerIndex can quote about Vine’s astronomical rise to the same engagement levels of Cinemagram in a fraction of the time, it may not continue to be the case. I also read an article ‘How to Wrap Your Business Around Twitter’s Vine’ which introduced three ways which businesses can utilise this new network. This can actually be applied to both of these and all video networks. I’m hoping to be able to test these platforms out soon. Let me know if you’ve had any successes or learnt any lessons from your trials so far.
I think this is really going to be the battle to watch, at least for now…
