2012 has been a good year for social media, since they have managed to establish their presence and expand their influence. If we had to evaluate the annual winners among the social networks, we would choose Pinterest and Instagram. As we have discussed at a previous post, social media is becoming
more visual than ever and this trend is attributed a lot to Pinterest and Instagram.
Pinterest became popular at the end of 2011, but during 2012 it managed to skyrocket its popularity, being the third biggest social network after Facebook and Twitter. It has 1.3 million daily visitors and its growth at a month-by-month basis has reached 400% for various months during 2012. What is more important, Pinterest became well known about its huge referral traffic. It has been noticed that Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined! This has enticed many business owners to become part of it, in order to reach a wider audience and create interesting boards with their products. After all, users spend a lot of time on Pinterest, which is also part of its success.
The latest successful social network of the year was Instagram, which took advantage of the rise of smartphone use. It combined the instant sharing of pictures through our smartphones and the appeal of the image through the filters that turned us all into photographers. It was definitely a good year for Instagram, since it has been bought in April by Facebook for 1 billion dollars, which was the first big sign that it was a promising social network. In July, Instagram already had 80 million users, while in September it reached the milestone of 100 million users. According to statistics by Huffington Post, the visitors of Instagram have increased by 724% over the last 6 months, while every day are uploaded 5 million photos! Its recent decision to create web profiles shows their plans for the future, expanding their reach and aiming to reach even higher with Facebook’s help.
If we had to make a guess for 2013 and the future of social networks, it is certain that they will be part of our lives for good. Facebook will possibly be our number one choice once again, but we are about to see more from Instagram, too. Twitter is creating its own filters for the images, which will bring an interesting competition between the two networks, while there are also various sites that try to compete with Pinterest. However, there is always space for a brand new network that will make the difference. Just wait and see!