Social Media Trends: Curation

The marketing question going into the new year (yes, 2011 already) is shaping up to be: "Are we in the stream?" Social media trends towards streams anyway: streams of news, streams of status messages, streams of constantly updated information, but what businesses looking to better their marketing strategy should be keeping their eye on is the "stream" of consumer-generated information. Social media has made it possible for anyone to be a reporter, so brands, deals, and news are flying from (Facebook) wall to wall, and iPhone to iPhone.

Aside from having a social media policy that pertains to employees, businesses should also be looking at the current consumer behavior. Facebook and Twitter are two obvious social media choices for broadcasting anything business related (or not), but they are becoming so massive that users are actually starting to trim down their follows and profiles. Sure, Twitter posts great deals, and Facebook's side modules are chalk full of personalized ads, but consumers are starting to seek out the even-more-personal approach. Speaking of Facebook, users are beginning to turn off brand posts on their Wall, pay attention only to their "real" friends and re-post only when something is really interesting.

The trend is reversing: it used to be that a friendship or relationship was only "official" once it was secured on Facebook. Now, users are starting to only follow or pay attention to the Facebook profiles of those with whom they are real-life friends. This means that news of any kind - business-related or not - is traveling by word-of-mouth, or its many social media equivalents. A social media trend, even beyond the start-up to help people deal with social media, is to help people deal with the information social media outlets are producing. Cadmus is a Twitter news feed curator: that is, it filters your Twitter follows based on patterns in Twitter usage. It tracks the most relevant posts and accounts since the last time a user logged in, and funnels that information, personally filtered, straight to your Twitter home page. Paper.li's goal is to turn Twitter into a newspaper.

And, because the majority of the world is mobile, other start-ups have developed the same ability as Cadmus, but for your iPad or iPhone. Flipboard claims to scour Twitter for what it has learned through analyzing your clicks and follows is most relevant to you. This social media trend of filtration means two things for businesses. First, to get noticed - that is, to get "in the stream" - and not lose pace with the rest of the business world, businesses will have to generate social media and online content. But, this day in age, that's a given.  Second, this content must be dazzlingly above the rest of the content out there: the social media trend of curation favors the big, the bold and the better!

Photo credit: Social Marketing Tricks