During the recent PubCon South at Austin 2011 conference, PubCon video content producer Vanessa Zamora sat down with conference speaker Krista Neher, CEO at Cincinnati-based Boot Camp Digital to discuss social media. Three social media trends on the horizon, according to Neher, are Twitter advertising, an ad platform with revenues projected to double in the next year, where we are likely to see the clever use of advertisements in the future. Businesses can run a Twitter ad in correlation to a specified hashtag. As an example, Neher shared that a company exhibiting during the PubCon conference could run a sponsored ad that would show up every time someone searches for '#PubCon' on Twitter, with a relevant call to action that is information-based. Secondly, Neher said she thinks Facebook commerce will become a billion dollar business over the next few years. Neher said that there are already applications that allow users to import their store and sell directly on Facebook. Buying products is a part of our lives, Neher added, so there is huge opportunity because of the amount of time people are spending on Facebook. Thirdly, Neher said she thinks location-based applications and mobile will explode; in two years 40 percent of Internet access is expected to take place through mobile devices. It dramatically changes people's strategies, Neher shared, as applications like Foursquare and Facebook Places continue gaining momentum.
