• 2nd most wired city in the country (Forbes)
• #10 Social Media City (Netpropex)
• #21 for business-based Twitter users (Netpropex)

It’s no wonder that Fast Company wrote up Atlanta as the city you should start a company in. During Social Media Atlanta week, some of the top Atlanta technology companies gathered in one room to talk about the next “social innovations”. Here’s some of what the experts say will be the next “BIG” things in 2011:

• Location-based services. Currently 4% of online adults use location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla, but with Facebook launching deals for their Places application, that percentage will most likely do a quantum leap forward. For various reasons, people have been slow to adopt the location-sharing services, but the incentive of acquiring a deal will entice more users to “check-in”.

• Consolidations of social media platforms. With Twitter, Facebook, Ping, Foursquare, people are connecting on TV, computer, tablet and mobile making an increasing need and demand to merge all social media accounts under one roof. There are a lot of companies scrambling to create a functional consolidation platform and it’s coming. The question is who will be the first to create the first functional consolidated platform?

• Social media crash. But no worries it will only be temporary. Facebook holds 23% of the market for U.S. ad display impressions, up from 9% just one year ago! As social media is becoming increasing inundated in our culture and people are bombarded by social media marketing, there’s inevitably going to be a tidal wave of people who throw their hands in the air and say, “Enough!” We saw a glimpse of earlier this year when Facebook changed it’s privacy policy and there was public uproar and backlash. At the same time, there’s still debate over what is the true value of a Facebook fan. There could be a wave of companies that will pull out of social media, because they never found a way to measure their activity and results.

Post written by: Holly