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Social Media: Five Facts to Bank On in 2012

A new year on the calendar means new hope, new opportunities, new products, new trends and, most important of all, new budgets for many marketers. And while you'll get served your share of predictions for the year ahead, here are five things you can bank on happening in social media.

The Face of Facebook Pages is Changing. Again.
The new Facebook Timeline began rolling out to individual user profiles last month and is designed to be the "journal of your life." Timeline is also coming to Pages, likely soon. While it's unclear exactly when it is coming or how similar it will be to what we've already seen, we should expect the rollout to begin early this year.

While brands' core strategy of creating content and messaging fans in their own newsfeed will not change, the content journey and user experience most certainly will. Facebook has already removed the restriction that prevents non-fans from interacting with Pages, and it would not be surprising to see them do away with "like gate" landing tabs as well. If that is the case, the approach to applications will change significantly and will be accessible only via paid media or engaging wall post messages.

In their place, expect to see the proliferation of open graph applications that aggregate on the Timeline. Spotify, Rdio, Yahoo! and The Wall Street Journal gave us a preview of how verbs and objects can take over a newsfeed meaning that the most important verb this year might just be "build" (as in "build an entirely new application to support our brand on Facebook").

Read the full article over at Ad Age!
Article by Matt Wurst, Director of Digital Communities at 360i