Catch up or Catch ya Later

In 2009 we saw exponential growth of social media and 2010 is proving to be no different. Since January, social media has become even more popular, more mobile, and more exclusive. Headliners are currently Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and the emerging Foursquare. If you aren’t familiar with at least one of these, social media is leaving you in the dust.

It seems to be an impossible feat to stay on top of social media trends these days, and many wonder: “How can I keep up?” Here’s our answer: you can’t. Once you accept the fact that the world of social media spins way faster than your own, you can start choosing technologies that support the goals that matter most to you and your business.

Before you devise a social media strategy, you’ll need to know your choices. While the options are seemingly endless, we offered a quick briefing back in march of 2009 to get you up-to-speed. http://thewychegroup.blogspot.com/2009/03/social-media-and-ever-changing-face-of.html

Today, experts are buzzing about the following six trends as the future of social media:
1. Social media begins to look less socialWith groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more exclusive.
2. Corporations look to scale
There are relatively few big companies that have scaled social initiatives beyond one-off marketing or communications initiatives. Best Buy's Twelpforce leverages hundreds of employees who provide customer support on Twitter. The employees are managed through a custom built system that keeps track of who participates.
3. Social business becomes serious play
Relatively new networks such as Foursquare are touted for the focus on making networked activity local and mobile. However, it also has a game-like quality to it which brings out the competitor in the user. As businesses look to incentivize activity within their internal or external networks, they may include carrots that encourage a bit of friendly competition.
4. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced)
If the company you work for doesn't already have a social media policy in place with specific rules of engagement across multiple networks, it just might in the next year.
5. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline
With approximately 70 percent of organizations banning social networks and, simultaneously, sales of smartphones on the rise, it's likely that employees will seek to feed their social media addictions on their mobile devices.
6. Sharing no longer means e-mail
The New York Times iPhone application recently added sharing functionality which allows a user to easily broadcast an article across networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Many websites already support this functionality, but it's likely that we will see an increase in user behavior as it becomes more mainstream for people to share with networks what they used to do with e-mail lists.

For more information please visit http://mashable.com/– currently the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news.