It’s the end of the year and everyone is coming out with predictions for big trends in 2012. Here’s three of the dark horse trends that may be unheard of right now, but have the potential to make the largest waves in social media.

Customer Connections

So far a lot of social media marketing for brands has been establishing social proof by letting a customer know that their friend likes or uses their products. The next step in this direction is to put customer in contact with customer and unite them around their support of the brand. This works on the consumer level (“Your friend bought this product and you can save 5% now if you share your purchase with them”) and the B2B side (“We’re working with a medical office and want to put your dental practice in touch with them as you already share some of the same followers in your network.”)

Social Teams

While successful enterprise wide social media adoption of connecting tools like Salesforce Chatter or Yammer continue to challenge most organizations, more and more smaller units will adopt those tools and leverage them for institutional awareness, clear communication and finding synergy between different projects within the company. Social media strategists will need to focus more time internally to make sure all these opportunities are being met, but the result will often be great improvements that couldn’t have been achieved without the connecting tools.

Big Data & the Social Media Analyst

Now that the role of the Social Media Manager has been clearly established, the next major hiring trend will be for a Social Media Analyst. Over the last few years the major social networks have made a lot more data available for analysis. At the same time Social Listening tools have continued to improve. Organizing that data, extruding significant statistics, and highlighting trends is becoming the domain of a relatively new position – the Social Media Analyst. The analyst works with the manager to sort and sift all the data coming in, find new sources of data, and new ways of presenting it and then provides that information to the team or client in a clear and easy to understand manner.

Are you planning on introducing any of these trends to your business?