It is the end of another social networking year and everyone is preparing for the new, settling the old, and prognosticating like crazy. I decided that if they can do this, then I should be allowed in on the fun as well. Heck! This is the one time out of the year that you can pretty much say anything, and no one can dispute the facts against you. Because the facts are in the future. That means a year from now, looking back at this post we are already in the past. Heavy man!

Which leads me to my idea that predictions should go beyond 2012.

Instead, I want to picture what social networking will look like on January 1st, 2013. What will the world look like approximately 375 days from now. So, join me on my time social networking 2013 time machine and let us get this party started.

 

Social Networking 2013 Crystal Ball

First, the trend to mobile continues. On January 1st, 2013 I predict that 2/3 of all social networking users in the US will access their mobile devices as much as they access their desktop computers to check in on social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

However, since this is such as huge trend right now I also want to add that 25% of those mobile users will be engaging in some form of Augmented Reality.

Second, Google Plus will have 250 million users. Where did I come up with this line of thinking! Right now they are around 50 million. It is not inconceivable for them to grow at a pace of over 50 million a quarter for the next year.

That might be a little ambitious, however, the majority of that growth would happen towards the later part of the year when Google finally gets the traction it needs to prove it is a long-standing viable competitor to Facebook.  More than likely it I can see the growth trend for each quarter as 25 million, 50 million, 50 million, and 75 million.

This site is hooked into the biggest online marketing platform on the web today with Google search, Gmail, and Youtube.

Now an even bigger question! Why is this important? To that we go to the bat mobile! Or my third social networking prediction 2013.

Third, Social networking will transform into social search. This will be largely in part to Google, but also because of the fact that every major social media entity has enhanced their search features. The social search line is gone, so backlinking alone is not enough for search traffic. Instead, you will need 1,000 back links and 100 likes, pluses, tweets, etc to look viable.

This will diminish the power of relationship building, but it will also provide a venue for small businesses to compete more competitively with larger ones. A merging a social and search means that content marketing will be even more important.

While large companies have the capacity to create volumes of content, most of them generally do not know what to say. Small businesses have the ability to relate to their readers, subscribers, fans, and followers a lot more effectively.

With all of these changes, the big question is how do we effectively manage our business using social networking in the next 375 days to January 1, 2013. That is exactly what we will discuss tomorrow with a brief social networking strategy session.