We've skimmed through many of the "Social In 2013" lists to create our own top nine.
These are the predictions that either came up again and again, or that echoed our own analysis and data.
We've tried to include predictions from across the social media ecosystem. But many of the important trends — such as social networking on mobile devices, and the growing popularity of messaging apps — will have impacts that cut across the tech industry.
1. Machine Learning And Image Recognition Will Be The New Frontier In Social Media And Big Data. Serving users more relevant content on social media benefits all parties. It improves the user experience and will help advertisers target potential customers. In order to harvest the most useful data and decide what content to show their hundreds of millions of individual visitors, the major social networks will use machine learning (i.e., algorithms that constantly self-correct themselves), along with image recognition software that can extract data from pictures. Machine learning systems in particular are more advanced than ever before. Just before the New Year, Facebook launched a dedicated artificial intelligence lab. Other social networks will likely follow.
2. Snapchat Will Reveal A Monetization Plan Based On Brand Accounts And Premium Features. 2013 was a huge year for Snapchat. The photo-sharing app turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook, which has to mean that the company is working on a major monetization plan. We suspect that Snapchat will model its plan after more mature messaging apps like LINE and WeChat, which are already generating revenue. For example, LINE generated $157 million in the third quarter of 2013, through paid brand accounts and selling digital goods and stickers that are similar to emoticons. We also suspect that creative tech-savvy brands will be interested in testing out ads on Snapchat. Taco Bell has already experimented quite a bit.
3. Crowd-funding Will Democratize Investing. The SEC lifted a decades-old ban in 2013 that prohibited venture firms from advertising their fundraising efforts, which means that venture capital firms will be able to use social media and other mass marketing tools to raise funds. "We think this is the future of fundraising," said John Frankel, founding partner of ff Venture Capital (ff stands for "founder friendly"). We've also seen ambitious tech startups like smartwatch maker Pebble successfully raise money via crowd funding sites like Kickstarter. We expect this trend to really take off in 2014, as millennials look to support causes that support social good or will fill underserved tech market niches.
4. Facebook Will Acquire A Global Messaging Platform To Squelch The Rise Of Messaging Apps. A select few messaging apps are now processing more messages and photos each day than Facebook. For example, WhatsApp has grown to a community of 400 million monthly active users, who send 16 billion messages and 500 million images per day. Other apps, such as WeChat and LINE, are not far behind either. Other messaging and voice-calling apps are also popular: KakaoTalk, Viber, etc. Similar to how Facebook acquired Instagram to stay relevant in photo-sharing, watch for Facebook to make a grab for one of the aforementioned messaging apps in 2014.
5. Facebook Will Continue To Lose Younger Users As Social Media Fragments. Facebook opened a can of worms during its 2013 third quarter earnings call when it admitted that teen usage was declining on the social network. Since then, more anecdotal and hard evidence emerges every day that young people are indeed disenchanted with Facebook. The trend we are seeing is that teens are replacing Facebook with a host of specialized mobile apps that do a select few activities very well. This has helped fuel the growth of messaging apps, which we expect will have another banner year in 2014.
6. Pinterest Will Have A Huge Year, As Twitter And LinkedIn See Slowdowns. Now that Pinterest has its own suite of ad products, we expect Pinterest to have a breakout year in 2014. Some are even predicting that the company could IPO next year. Already, 29% of marketers say they've used Pinterest's Sponsored Pins ads. Twitter and LinkedIn are coming off successful runs in 2013, but will lose some of their shine. Twitter will continue to find user growth a challenge. LinkedIn will hit a plateau in terms of engagement although it will become mobile-first and begin to see a majority of visits from mobile. Still, no matter how mobile-friendly it becomes and how much content LinkedIn pumps onto its pages, it's still mostly a resume-posting, business-to-business marketing, and recruitment site. Meanwhile, marketers will become enthused with Pinterest's proven capacity to drive e-commerce traffic and sales.
7. YouTube And Google+ Will Integrate More Deeply To Improve Video Discovery. YouTube and Google+ are two of the most underrated properties on the web. YouTube has more than 1 billion monthly active users, and Google+ is integrated into all of Google's major products — from email to search. Google+ is now powering the commenting system on YouTube, and we suspect that the social network will also begin to play a more important role in recommending videos to make YouTube more personalized for users. YouTube has long been in need of an organizing principle to become a stickier platform, not just a place to quickly go for in-and-out video views. Google+-powered video recommendations and comments may be the backbone YouTube needed.
8. Facebook And Google+ Increasingly Become The Internet's Traffic Cops. Mark Zuckerberg is on a mission to improve the quality and relevance of content in users' Facebook News Feed. Recent changes to the News Feed algorithm indicate that publishers are going to benefit from this new direction for Facebook's flagship product. In similar fashion, Google Search is now giving precedence to content coming from Google+. And it has proven willing to abruptly turn off the traffic to sites that it believes are misbehaving. Just witness what happened to Rap Genius. Facebook and Google Search hold many of the strings that control Web traffic these days, so publishers are going to be working hard in 2014 to figure out these new mechanics, and stay on Facebook and Google's good sides.
9. Twitter Will Launch Its Own Mobile-First Real-Time Bidding Ad Exchange. Twitter is under pressure from public investors to find new avenues for generating revenue. The company acquired mobile ad exchange MoPub in 2013, and Twitter will relaunch MoPub in 2014 as the world's first mobile-centered RTB social ad exchange. Like Facebook's FBX, it may be "bring your own data," which means that advertisers will need to bring IP addresses, emails, and other unique identifiers that Twitter will then use to show ads to specific users within Twitter, often to retarget them based on past Web browsing behavior. Twitter already allows for similar retargeting to happen via its Tailored Audiences product, just not in real-time. Unlike FBX, which is still desktop-only, Twitter's ad exchange will be mobile-centric from the start, and so it will be especially powerful as a cross-device targeter: through a Twitter login, advertisers will be able to target the same user across devices.
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