Social media is constantly evolving and it can be hard for marketers to keep up with all the latest sites and innovations. Here is a look at some of the newest social media destinations as well as mobile apps that are making a splash.

Video Sharing

Five brand new video-sharing apps are currently in intense competition—Keek, Cinemagram, Vyclone, Twitter’s Vine, and Google’s YouTube Capture—demonstrating that “visual content rules social media” in the words of Jim Dayton, Digital Strategy Lead at Intouch Solutions. Visual content has also gone commercial with Chirpify, a seamless payment system for buying and selling over Twitter, currently extending its capabilities to photo-sharing service Instagram.

 SoLoMo

feature2_whats-hot-in-social-media-Banjo-Screenshot

Banjo, the newest SoLoMo (“social-local-mobile”) networking app, organizes all your friends across all your social networks—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.—but does so by location, so you can see not only what’s near your location, but what your friends in Chicago are doing.

 

Wearables

Wearables such as Google Glass (augmented reality glasses) will ultimately provide the perfect integration of visual content and SoLoMo networking. Google Glass was selected as one of Time magazine’s “Best Inventions of the Year 2012” and was first released for a select group of developers in late January 2013. (Consumer adoption promised in 2014.) The surprisingly elegant glasses display information in response to voice commands (no hands) in smartphone-like format. They make it effortless to record and share visual experience and to integrate location-based information. See Google’s demo at bit.ly/GoogleVid.

 Most Addictive

Thumb is a highly engaging new mobile app that makes it easy to share personal opinions. CEO Dan Kurani says a new version of the app increased user engagement from under four hours to an average of five hours per month in just five months, in contrast to Pinterest’s average user engagement of 98 minutes. (Facebook is over 6 hours.) In September 2012, it reported more than 1.2 million users.

Health Consumer Consultancy

WellnessFX and CarePlanners are new startups designed to connect health consumers with a rich consultancy support network. CarePlanners employs consultants with a wide range of expertise, including registered nurses, social workers, Medicare experts and healthcare advocates, to help consumers navigate a confusing market. It was the People’s Choice winner of Morgenthaler Ventures’ “DC to VC: HIT Startup Showcase.” WellnessFX, which provides personal consultation and individualized health planning based on a sample of your blood, was named one of the top five innovations in health and fitness for Mashable’s 2012 Innovation Index by Sarah Robb O’Hagen, President of Equinox Fitness.

Peer-to-Peer Networking

Fitocracy brings the power of social networking to fitness training, motivating through gamification, community, and personal guidance. It won the Health and Fitness category in Mashable’s 2012 Innovation Index (bit.ly/InnovIndex). Inspire (www.inspire.com), which offers an increasingly influential model for peer-to-peer support groups, works with over 80 patient advocacy organizations to build these support groups for a vast variety of health needs and conditions. Inspire’s health communities have grown about 46% over the last two years to 312,000 members and a few hundred support groups.

LinkedIn for Docs

Two-year old Doximity has joined QuantiaMD and Sermo in the battle to become the LinkedIn of the medical community, reporting 20% of the physicians in the U.S. as members. All three have shown rapid growth in the past year as the government has tightened privacy laws and doctors seek a secure way to collaborate and communicate with peers.

Tweet Tracking

Finally, for those trying to keep up with the explosion of tweets, we draw your attention to the still-growing Healthcare Hashtag Project (www.symplur.com/healthcare-hashtags), a powerful tool for finding, tracking and organizing healthcare-related tweets, maintained as a community service by Symplur.

 

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