The last couple of years have witnessed a tremendous growth of social media. While a decade ago it was viewed as fad, the perception has changed greatly as marketers and organizations see a valuable avenue to reach out to the outside world in an easy and cost effective way.
The emerging of more social websites and their growing membership size shows how influential social media has become. It is an indication that it is not an idea that is dying soon. In the coming years there are predictions of increased reliance in social media for purposes of marketing and information distribution. Some of these changes are already being experienced while others are clearly on the pipeline.
Privacy is slowly being done away with as social media opens up peoples lives through interaction. In the coming years it will be easy to get the true personal profiles of employers and employees on social media. From there, one can tell their interests, likes, dislikes, opinions on various issues and even credentials. More private life data will be available as people upload videos, photos and family information that was previously confidential. This will generally make it easier to do business and socialize among many other things.
It is predicted that the influence of social media will grow threefold in the coming years as more people learn of its benefits and subscribe to various social networks. This will increase the demand and search for information on the popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Baidu and Bing. Blogs and social websites like Twitter and Facebook that have already established themselves as leading social networking sites will be the biggest beneficiaries in this expected boom.
Due to the huge influx of data in social media networks, content management will be the next big headache. The owners of social networks will have to get reliable content management programmes for their websites to remain functional. Currently, almost every member in these social websites has at least two profiles running on the same or different platforms. If this is replicated to the millions that are joining each day, you will know why content filters and aggregators will be hot cakes in the coming years.
Finally, it is expected that almost all websites will allow user ratings. This will help marketers to gauge the performance of their products or services in the market. This feature will also come along with open real time response and reactions form users of such products.