It is the end of the year, time of making flashback about what have happened in the territory of our work, especially in the field of social marketing. We have to realize that some part of the social media hasn’t changed in the way and speed that it had been predicted in the beginning of 2014, although there are some bright stars on the sky of social media that improve faster than we thought and they become the real comets of social marketing. Each of them give a great sample of the future of the social media. But not just the enterprises has changed but also the social media user’s behavior. They share less and less, and they become more and more security conscious.

Let’s look back at 2014 and see what just happened. Doing that will help us look forward and make predictions what is going to happen.

The social media phase of the Internet ended
This may have happened a few years ago actually but the process accelerated strongly this year. Entrepreneurs and developers still build social applications, we still use them, but there isn’t much innovation here anymore. The big platforms are mature. Their place is secure.

Messaging is the new social media
This may be part of what is going on in the previous phenomena. Families use Whatsapp groups instead of Facebook. Kids use Snapchat instead of Instagram. Facebook’s acquisition of Whatsapp in February of this year was the transaction that defined this trend. Even the biggest companies feel the wind of change, which is why they try to adapt to it by integrating the smaller but much more innovative groups/firms/start-ups.

The “sharing economy” was outed as the “rental economy”
Nobody is sharing anything. People are making money, plain and simple. Technology has made renting things (even in real time) as simple as it made buying things a decade ago. Uber and Airbnb are the big winners in this category but there are and will be others.

Mobile Operation System has become a stable duopoly around the world
But Android is splintering into Google Android and non-Google Android and that may lead to new large players. 2014 was a big coming out party for Xiaomi. If and when they come to the US, things will get interesting. They are the new (and better) Samsung.

Mobile and messaging has started to impact the enterprise
Slack is the poster boy for this trend in 2014.

Youtube became a monster
It always has been. But in 2014 Youtube emerged as the place for entertainment consumption for anyone under 16. And these youngsters are going to grow up quickly. Watching even movies on YouTube.

We finally got rid of files
Dropbox, Google Drive, Soundcloud, Spotify, Netflix, Hbogo, Youtube, Wattpad, Kindle, and a host of other cloud based services finally killed off three letter filenames like mp3, mov, doc and xls.

Cyberwarfare, cybercrime, cyberhacking, and cybersecurity was by far the dominant theme of 2014
If anyone had their head in the sand on this one before this year, they don’t anymore. This is our new normal.

Many other important things have happened in 2014, but the above mentioned trends are the ones that will probably guide social media and its usage in the future, even in 2015.

We will see…

Happy New Year!

Sources:
avc.com