December 29, 2009 — Posted by Anita Hamilton

2009 Top Trends & 2010 Predictions

2009 Top Trends

In 2009, celebrities, marketing agencies, and the “under 35’s” fully embraced Twitter and other forms of social media. Nielsen Online ratings  indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year, with 7 million unique visitors in February 2009 in the US alone. Twitter is the 2009 Trend Winnah!

Mobile media messaging in general via web browsing, texting, and other “apps”, driven in part by iphone growth and increased market share, is quickly outgrowing the “early adopter” phase and becoming the norm.  YouTube is already getting more viewers a month than all the major televison networks combined. Facebook continued to grow, with their Farmville game exceeding 11.5 million daily users.

2010 Predictions

Your grandparents will soon be “twits”!  But love them anyway.

More companies will utilize search engine marketing strategies and reroute their marketing funds from traditional media such as yellowpage and newspaper advertising, to internet marketing campaigns.

Facebook, YouTube and other social media marketing advertising revenues will continue to grow rapidly as more applications and target markets are developed.  Gaming on social media in general, will explode. It took World of Warcraft (the single most prolific online computer game to date) 4 years to get to 12.5 million users; Facebook’s Farmville was almost there in less than 2 months.

SMB revenues will continue to dip or stagnate until an upward trend starting Spring 2010, at which time internet marketing PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising costs will start to increase.

ICAN (the international domain name registry) recently approved a proposal to accept non-English characters in top-level domains as a result, new foreign markets, typo & domain squatting will become significant trends.