What is Happening in Social Media: 2013 Trends

It is true, the site that allows people to pin their favorite images, web pages and page elements onto boards is now dominated by women. Current research shows that over 90% of the profiles are female. Social media does tend to have more female profiles than male profiles, with the most prominent two (Facebook and Twitter) having more female profiles than male. The only one that is more evenly spread is YouTube. Still, Pinterest is dominated by women and this new information has started to change the way that companies are advertising on Pinterest.

See also: 16 Easy Steps To Make Best Use Of Pinterest For Your Business.

The whole “appeal to women” idea that happened (accidentally?) with Pinterest has started a little wave of new social media networks setting themselves up to attract women or compete with Pinterest. As you may image, a lot of them have already faded out of memory, and none of them are coming close to getting the numbers that Pinterest are getting. Still, the fight for the female social media market is well underway in the year 2013. Whether Pinterest will be replaced in the way that people thought Google+ would replace Facebook is yet unknown as only time will tell.

Websites are soon going to run social media network graveyard sites listings all of the websites that have set themselves up as a social media network, only to fail miserably. Even Google had a few failures before enjoying a little success with Google+. Social media sites aimed at children seem to be failing and failing hard, but the reason why is unclear. Facebook has shown us that children do use social media, so why these new social media networks are failing is not yet clear.

If you are unsure of this then type “funny image” into the Google image search bar and you will see hundreds of images, where you can guarantee that most of them have been viral. How can you tell? The fact that they come up with the search term “funny image” is a giveaway. The people who start viral images will rarely call it a funny image or tag it as such. The tag/title/file name with the words “funny image” on is from people who have shared and reposted it as they describe what they are re-posting.

It is one of those phenomena where people just seem to have heard of something, even though it is not highly publicized. For some reason you can walk into a crowded room and call out a memorable YouTube video and dozens of people will have seen it. You can go around the room asking people the video they saw, they shout it out and other people in the room have seen it.

It is a commonly occurring phenomenon but nobody is sure why. There are thousands upon thousands of videos on YouTube, so how is it that we are all aware of so many of them? The YouTube statistics press release may offer some clue, as they claim that six billion hours of video are watched per month on YouTube.

There are a lot of different IM services online at the moment, including a popular one that is run by Facebook. But, there are too many and it becomes annoying having to keep lots of apps open on your mobile device, of lots of IM systems open on your desktop computer.

Combined IM apps are growing slowly in popularity. They allow a person to use multiple IM services at one time with just one screen open. Their popularity is only just starting to become apparent, but this is one service that is bound to be massive in months/years to come. Expect to see one or more of them become very popular and expect to start seeing similar programs being built for desktop computers.

Instagram has started allowing people to upload videos as well as images, and the attendance rate for Vine has started to fall faster than King Kong off of buildings when his captive lady friend drops a stinker. Some people suggested that advertisers should stick with Vine as they will have a captive audience, but attendance is falling off so fast that there seems little point. The fact alone that Instagram offers the ability to post videos that are longer than 6 seconds is reason enough to bury Vine with the rest of the failure family.

There are more adverts, many of which are inescapable, and there is a massive amount of spam videos. These are videos that have a title that has nothing to do with the content. YouTube are letting standards slip because they have become very big, so keep an eye out for potential competitors that could steal their top spot right from under them.

Take a look at Social Media Statistics in 2013 Infographic:



This Guest Article is written by Kate Funk. She is a blogger by profession and currently she writes for Speaken.net. She also specializes in topics related to techno geeks and networking enthusiasts.