Social Media Strategy Trends Shaping 2011

Marketers who built their 2011 plans in January had to rewrite parts of them by summer. This was a year where the ground moved under existing strategy more than once. Here is what changed and what it meant for how businesses should be operating on social media right now.

Google+ arrived and forced a real decision

Google launched Google+ in June, initially by invitation only, as its most serious attempt yet to compete directly with Facebook. Business Pages followed in November, giving brands an official presence on the network. For marketers, this created a genuine strategic question rather than an easy add-on: build a presence early on a platform with an uncertain future audience, betting on Google’s ability to pull users over from Facebook, or wait and risk being late if it takes off. Most brands moving into it are doing so as a small, watchful experiment rather than a serious investment, which is the right instinct given how early it is.

LinkedIn’s IPO put professional networking on the board’s radar

LinkedIn went public in May, and the market’s reaction, its stock more than doubling on the first day of trading, did something no marketing pitch had managed: it got professional social networking taken seriously in boardrooms that had dismissed it as secondary to Facebook and Twitter. B2B marketers in particular are now getting budget approval for LinkedIn efforts that would have been a hard sell twelve months ago.

Pinterest went from unknown to a real strategy question

Pinterest, an invite-only visual bookmarking site launched in 2010, spent much of this year growing quietly before its traffic and engagement numbers became hard for marketers to ignore in the back half of 2011. Its appeal is specific: retail, home goods, food and fashion brands are seeing real referral traffic from a platform built entirely around saving and sharing images, a use case none of the major networks were built around. It is still invite-only, which limits how fast any brand can act on it, but it is now on strategy agendas that did not mention it in January.

Facebook announced Timeline, and brand Pages are next

Facebook unveiled Timeline at its f8 developer conference in September, a complete visual redesign of the profile that turns it into a chronological life story rather than a simple wall of posts. Facebook has signaled that brand Pages will eventually move to the same format, which means everything marketers currently know about optimizing a Page’s layout and pinned content is about to need rework. Smart teams are treating this as a heads up to start planning now rather than a surprise to react to once it lands.

Klout scores started showing up in marketing decisions

Klout, a service that scores individual social media accounts for influence, moved this year from a curiosity to something brands and PR teams actively use to identify people worth reaching for product outreach and events. It is an imperfect measure and it has plenty of critics, but enough brands are now factoring Klout scores into influencer outreach that ignoring it entirely means missing part of how some of your competitors are already operating.

Taken together, these five threads point the same direction: social media strategy in 2011 stopped being a two-platform conversation about Facebook and Twitter. Any plan that has not accounted for at least watching Google+, Pinterest and the coming Facebook redesign is already behind where the market has moved this year.