Five Technologies Your Business Will Be Using in Five Years

As originally appearing here: http://ping.fm/YGHfQ

Social Media is constantly evolving to bring on bigger, faster and more powerful tools to its users. Which parts of Social is evolving and what tools will your business be tapping into in the near future?

Feeds and Streams: This is where all “real-time” activity occurs. Each place that is considered “social” has a feed or stream and is the space where all engagement is taking place. As online business continues to adapt to the changing demands of the consumer, it will be important to interact more frequently using feeds or streams. Funny enough, it doesn’t take much to get involved. Just send out a post or a tweet and you’re already part of the conversation.

Multimedia: A website just doesn’t cut it anymore. These days, and well into the future, our worth and value will be proved by the things we do outside of our own network. YouTube is the major player and will continue to dominate in both traffic and interest. As a result, TV and radio advertising spend will certainly drop as more and more businesses opt to produce content for YouTube. As iTunes’ popularity increases, podcasts will be another major tool businesses can utilize to tap into the right market.

Social Search: Search Engine Optimization won’t be the dominant force in online marketing within a few years, but will evolve to embrace Social. Social Media is already taking its place on Google, with real-time results, blogs, YouTube and other interesting things appearing in our search results. Facebook’s partnership with
Bing allows Facebook users to search the web from within Facebook, and displays results that your friends are interested in. This in turn, makes search more relevant for the end consumer as they know what is hot and what is not.

Mobile Technology: The fight to be in the palms of the consumer is already on. Apple’s iPhones took the market for awhile, but Google’s Android has quickly stepped up as a solid competitor. This means your customers are Socializing and Googling from their devices more and more. Your website should be useable from any device, no matter the size, and you should be enriching with the content that people love to use when they are on the run. To add fuel to the fire, both Facebook and Playstation are rumored to be entering the mobile device market, which should make for a very interesting device war.

Geolocation: Perhaps the most interesting space to watch is geolocation, where many handheld devices can pinpoint their location. For awhile, Foursquare held the popularity fort here, but Facebook’s Places has quickly gained traction. This allows businesses to “claim” their geolocation and let consumers “check in” when they are visiting. This alerts all of their friends that they are spending money with you. The geolocation space is evolving at an incredibly fast rate and tools are being developed to allow users to do things like check for celebrities, check speed cameras, read up on history and even save lives.

What do you think is hot for digital business?

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Until Next Time,
Tomer Garzberg (Keynote Social Media Speaker and Social Technologist)
Australia to the World: Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne
www.strongmandigital.com.au

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