Note: This is a blog post for my IST 600 Blogging for Information Professionals class; for this assignment, we are to explain how our blog will be affected by current trends in social media.

Groundswell toward Mobile

Personally, I believe that the increasing use of mobile devices is one of the major trends in Social Media right now.  Over the past year I have become addicted to social media on my iPhone and it’s very difficult for me to go back to a “desktop” (or laptop in my case) interface for most social media sites.  I hate the sprawling mess of the desktop Facebook site and much prefer the simple mobile interface on my iPhone app.  At work, we just rolled out a new internal social media site from a major IT vendor; unfortunately, it doesn’t have a mobile component and it makes me feel like whoever invented this just doesn’t “get” the way social media is consumed in 2012.  I don’t have a lot of time in my day, and I sneak in my social media fix by taking advantage of brief snatches of time: waiting for a meeting to begin, standing in line for lunch, and even on bathroom breaks.  During the second calendar quarter of 2012, 36.9% of mobile users accessed a social media or blog site on their handheld device; the access rate for smartphone users is almost double this.  Consequently, it is important to make sure that my blog’s content is mobile friendly.

In order to do this, I have gravitated toward using smaller graphic images to avoid long download times on a mobile device.  If I am doing a video blog, I try to post my video on YouTube and link to it there, because in the early days of mobile smartphones, some phones had problems rendering videos outside of YouTube.  Keeping my blog videos short (i.e. 5 minutes or less) is also something I strive for in order to avoid burning through my reader’s data plan in one viewing.  I will also need to carefully consider how my written content looks visually from a mobile perspective and monitor the length of my posts because mobile device users generally expect shorter paragraphs and total article lengths.  I will need to take longer posts and break them up into separate posts over two or three days in order to make these more readable and user friendly for mobile devices.

Microblogging

A trend closely related to increased use of mobile social media, is the rise of microblogging. With mobile users sneaking in bits of time on their devices, it is much easier for them to post a short message and/or image, than write a full blog post; consequently, microblogging sites and features have become more popular. From a blogging perspective this means that in order to get people to invest the time in reading my blogpost, I will need to become more adept at making short, enticing, microblogging posts that cause enough curiosity or desire on the part of the reader to click through on the included link to my blogsite. I may need to establish a presence on Tumblr, for example, and work on my photography and 140 character writing skills in order to present images and short descriptions which capture the viewer’s attention and make him/her want to invest enough time to read the story behind the image (on my blog).

As search engines continue to become more sophisticated, I will need to be attuned to the changes in their algorithms and adjust to these as well.  As search engines incorporate more human feedback into their rating systems, I will need to ensure that each post is the best quality that I can deliver.  Since search engines are incorporating more social media connections into their results, it will be important to be active on various social media platforms and be seen as an influencer.  Fresh content also seems to be listed higher in the rankings than older content.  I will need to rewrite older pillar posts into new posts to stay relevant.  Also, in line with the mobile and microblogging trends it will be important to post shorter posts on a more frequent basis.  Finally, the trend toward emphasizing Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), by tracking which links actually get clicked instead of merely counting links, will require putting more thought into how links are used in my blog.