Top Social Media Trends in 2013

Photo by epSos .de / Flickr

Social media changes quickly. I received a tweet about that the other day and reposted it to Facebook where someone used Google+ to share it to a select circle of their web publishing friends. Okay, maybe I made all of that up, but you get the idea - social networks are where it's at these days. Keep reading for some of the biggest trends in the industry in 2013.

Google+ and Author Rank
While Google+ may not be the most popular social media website, they have been busy working this year. One of the things they're doing more of is tying Google+ accounts to articles written online, enabling them to use Author Rank to make their search index more useful. Expect more of this in 2014 and beyond.

And speaking of Google+, they were trending a little better in 2013, although they still can't manage to take over as the dominant social network. This may have to do with the fact that it seems a bit clunky (or too confusing) for people used to the uniformity of Facebook - not to mention the fact when they merged Google+ with YouTube comments in 2013 it really upset many users.

Facebook Gets Older
Not only has Facebook gotten older, there are signs that they are losing younger users. This is usually one of the first signs that a social media website is about to die. Some call this moment jumping the shark in honor of that classic Happy Days episode where the Fonz actually jumped over a shark while wearing his leather jacket.

Even if Facebook dies like MySpace, there are still a lot of other options, some of which will become even more useful to fill the void left by no more Facebook. Then again, maybe Zuckerberg will manage to keep his website going because of the billions of dollars he's made from people all over the world so far.

Twitter Goes Public
The other big trend in 2013 was social media companies (like Twitter) going public. After the Twitter IPO, many other companies in the social network world began to wonder if they might go public someday as well. This may be something that happens to more social media companies in 2014 and beyond, making it yet another social media trend in 2013 that will keep happening for years to come.

Social Media and Search
Social media signals are being used to help make the search results better for Google, Bing and others. For example, if you search for Reno NV Realtor, you're going to find the results different depending on where you are in the world. Where you're searching from is actually a big part of search these days and social media plays into this quite a bit.


Written by: Sara Xiang likes to spend a lot of time online reading articles. She also spends quite a few hours writing articles to be published here and there around the Internet.

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