2012 Social Media Startups

Hot on the coat tails of social media’s current love affair with Pinterest, come a handful of start ups that have all kicked off in 2012. Some less subtle then others! Let’s take a quick look at just a handful of them.

“Social Travel” has been growing in leaps and bounds. As everything seems to follow Pinterest in trending towards more visual approaches to content; we’re seeing a lot of similarly styled sites popping up.

Trippy recently redesigned its site to jump on the Pinterest bandwagon. Users can now create travel boards and can pin images to them, comment, and also choose to tag their images with “Want to go” or “been there”.

Though originally launched some 3 years ago, just earlier this month, the visual-travel-discovery site, Wanderfly, redesigned and re launched their site. Gtrot, another social travel site has also opted for a more visual focused design update, with similar photo uploading and recommendations.

Now moving away from travel and more to commerce, Fancy can be described as a Pinterest catering for ecommerce merchants, facilitating ecommerce in two ways;

• The majority of items pinned on Fancy come straight from ecommerce stores, so a ‘Buy it’ button takes users straight to the merchant's page

• Users can also purchase items directly from the Fancy site, involving merchants more directly in the process. This requires merchants to find items that users have fancied, when they find something that they stock the merchant can place a bid to sell that particular item, through Fancy, by using the ‘I want to sell it’ button.

Pingram.me sells itself as a mash up of Instagram and Pinterest, though you’d be hard pushed to tell the difference between it and the latter of those two at a glance. The major difference between the two is that pinning on Pingram is only enabled on photos taken by other Pingram users. This approach is intended to both respect Pinterest etiquette and protect other Instagram users from having their images shared unknowingly.

Now moving momentarily back to the world of Social Travel, but refreshingly un-Pinterest like, we have this new site, Tripbirds. Rather than relying on friends to create content, Tripbirds instead organises geotagged content from other friends on different platforms, which at the moment includes popular media such as Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram.

Mashable has kindly outlined ‘9 social networks to watch’; such as Path, Highlight, Sonar, Banjo, Glancee, Localmind, Forecast, Gogobot and Fancy which we mentioned above. All these social networks are trying to win an audience over from Facebook, yet trying not to become too similar to Facebook; which already offers some very similar features to these new start-ups and has the added bonus of being used by many of the businesses we work with and certainly all our friends.

Of course, whilst spreading your influence is important, getting on board every social media fad that pops up isn’t a constructive use of time and effort. If you’re interested in investing into social media and discovering where to focus your efforts, why not get in contact with Rocktime and talk to our Flashlight team about discovering a Social media strategy tailored for you.


Author: Alice Cheetham