What a year 2009 has been for social media. It has swept into the consciousness of most people around the world and is starting to be embraced by brands and businesses who see it as a key way of both communicating and selling to their customers. You can see the top 50 social media stories of 2009 here but we wanted to take a look into the future and see if we could have a look at where we are headed over the next 12 months. Predicting the future can be a tricky and foolish business that in hindsight can make you look foolish and with social Media being one of the fastest moving industries around we are setting ourselves up for a big fall with our predictions but it is still worth a shot…

Facebook To Monetize

There is no doubt that this is well under way already but this will be the year that Facebook moves further towards that IPO by starting to monetize their close to 400 million users. You will see an increasing amount of micro payments being made through the platform and this could be the year where we see brands actively selling goods through Facebook. Facebook have been on a land grab of users over the past 12 months adding a reported 650,000 new users per day and that will continue this year (might we even see them approaching the 1 billion active user mark by the end of 2010?) but the emphasis has already started to shift and Facebook seem to be trying to cosy up to large brands all over the world to attract the advertising dollars. Expect Facebook to roll out more features like Fan Pages this year to attract even more brands and expect plenty of brands to be seduced by Facebook because we all know that brands go where the eyeballs are and at the’ moment that is without a doubt Facebook.

Mobile Social Media

We often hear that this is going to be the year of the mobile but I have never really thought that until this year. There are a number of reasons for that and the main one is the increasing amount of people with good handsets. Don´t just think of all the cool kids with iPhones but now your mum and dad are going to be spending a large amount of time online as well. There are some other factors like offices blocking social media sites and users starting to bypass that by using their mobiles and better tariffs from the operators.

The Numbers Will Be Forgotten

2009 was very much the year of people trying to get as many followers as possible but things will get a little more exclusive in 2010. Less will become more and social networks will focus more on the people you actually know and trust. The noise factor will be taken out of social media and the tools and services that we all use will focus their attention on the quality of information that we all digest rather than the sheer volume that we currently get in our streams.

Twitter Equals Customer Service

2009 was a year of explosive growth for Twitter and lots of brands jumped in head first and started to talking to their customers and in a lot of cases trying to sell to them directly. Despite stories from the likes of Dell claiming to have made over 6 million dollars in sales the success stories on Twitter have actually been few and far between with regards to sales. Growth has cooled at Twitter recently and we see that trend continuing in to 2010 no matter how many new features they roll out. Brands and businesses will see the power of Twitter for customer servioce tool and to that effect you can expect Twitter themselves to roll out professional accounts where they can slowly start to monetize their user base. Very much in the same way that Facebook introduced Fan Pages Twitter will roll out a new area for brands that will allow increased interaction and possibly different types of content. This will be a year of consolidation for Twitter, a year where brands and businesses figure out how to use it effectively now that all the silly rushing for followers and novelty has worn off.

Location Based Advertising

We are seeing this start to sprout up with very early adopters on services like Gowalla and Foursquare but their user base is still tiny and at the end of the day they are based around a game which is not going to be to everybody’s taste. What is immediately clear however is that there is an appetite for location based services and Foursquare has tapped in to this very early on. I don´t expect the masses to be flocking to these niche plays and instead expect Google who love collecting our advertising money and have tons of location data or even Facebook to enter the market and really get the mainstream tuned in to location based advertising. I expect hyper local advertising for businesses or all shapes and sizes to be a huge emerging factor not just this coming year but for many years to come.

Apple Tablet

For those of you living under a stone for the last couple of months there have been a lot of rumors about a new apple tablet device that would be somewhere between a giant iPhone device and a space shuttle depending on which rumours you are listening to. The truth is that just with the iPhone nobody really has a clue but whatever it does look like and actually do it will more than likely revolutionize the whole tablet market and create huge hype. I think even Apple were taken aback by the overall success of the app store and they will no doubt try and tap in to that success further with the huge amount of possibilities that a larger screen and faster computing power open up. Expect this to be the most hyped story of the year (probable launch in January) with developers flocking to the new platform.

If the coming year is even half as exciting for social media as the one we have just seen then we are going to be in for a lot of progress and fun. Here is to 2010 being a good one

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