State of Socialness

In Social
07/02/10
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2009 will be considered the year when Social Networks exploded and became The topic of almost every new venture coming out in the Internet space. With economic gloom everywhere, people flocked to social networks like Linkedin to find new opportunities. Having ample time with them meant playing around social utility sites such as Facebook to engage with friends and family, sharing every important and less important moment of their lives. Who could have imagined all your friends and family addicted to farming? Zynga creator of famous Facebook games such as farmville, Mafia wars etc. make half a billion dollars now based on our addiction.

Another important ingredient in the social success was the flooding of Internet enabled / social utility devices. Having the ability to update their status on the go and comment on friends posts, enabled mobile savvy users to participate in the ever increasing use of the social nets. Fueling fuel to the fire, telco’s have been offering solutions to people to participate in the social nets with their custom SMS based solutions. Sites like Facebook have experienced heavy increase in usage from mobile devices. As a an example, my wife, a tech-savvy mac user would use facebook to be connected with her friends and family whenever she gets the chance to be online, if the kids spare her time to do so. About 2 months back she won a Samsung Corby from a McDonalds giveaway deal. Having an internet enabled device has allowed her to be more frequent user and spares her the hassle of finding time to go online. And this is just the start, the androidization of the mobile industry will bring out a foray of Internet enabled devices, talk about social then.

Twitter became the new thing in town in 2009 and literally exploded. Important global events like Obama’s campaign, the Iranian elections are some of the events which were shaped with the tweets, status updates and messages or as they are called retweets by the twitter users. The biggest reason for Twitter success can be contributed to the excellent API and 3rd party clients around it. Just having the ability to converse in 140 characters, the service is also ideal for SMS enabled devices and telco services.

Locally, in Pakistan, the social networks also enjoyed a very aggressive growth. Social marketing through Facebook also became part of every new AD Campaign by the telco’s and FMCG giants. As of today, Facebook claims that their are about 400 Million active users of the mega site and out of which the population of users from Pakistan is 1,475,560. LinkedIn boasts a user base of 55 Million and growing and have a strong user base from Pakistan. Twitter which is hovering around a user base of 20 Million or so, have seen a considerable increase in users from Pakistan. But with twitter, the 60% plus abandonment rate follows, which means if 100 users sign up, about 60 leave or never use the application after 1st month. I’ll be honest here, its only after pushing by many friends that I have started to use Twitter, at the moment only as an observer. I don’t want myself to be counted in the league of people who have bad case of loss of bladder control and would use tweets to flood the net

So what are we going to witness in 2010:

The word Social Marketing will be the new buzz but at the same time the most vague statement of them all. Just making a Facebook page and imaging a million fans will join in Not social marketing
Facebooks OpenGraph release in Q2 will propel creation of niche’ social nets on a mega Ning state
Mashing API’s of all major social nets will be the most common thing
Ofcourse, there will be consolidation in this space. Big fish will eat the small fish
As we know that the dogs can tweet now too, everything that can be hooked to the net, that be lets say your security guard will be able to, thanks to plethora of devices coming out
And my favorite of them all, recruitment will be social

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