At Garden Media Group, we spend a lot of time thinking about trends--especially for the garden.

Lately, the office has been a buzz with social media trends. Facebook Fatigue and the release of Instagram video are drastically changing the landscape of social media.

Social media trends allow you to connect with your green, gardening customers. Plus, it shows your audience that your brand is forward-thinking.

Keep up with the social media trends, and discover five topical changes in social media that will affect your garden business this year.

Social Media Is NOT a Trend

When social media first debuted many moons ago, it was thought to be a trend, even a fad. It's turned out to be anything but. 

Social Media Examiner reported in its 2013 Social Media Marketing Report that a whopping 97% of marketers now integrate social media into their plans.

Everyone may be using social media, but, according to the report, only one in four of these marketers were able to measure the ROI - return on investment - with social media.

Are you one of the four? If not, read up on tracking the ROI on social media. If you are investing time and money into social media, be sure you're doing it as effectively as possible with this round-up of the hottest social media tools.

Visual Platforms Dominate

Pinterest, Instagram, and Vine prove consumers want to SEE what you have to say!

If you want to get retweeted or gain more Facebook followers, rely heavily on images and very little on words. A quick caption will suffice! With Google+, the bigger, bolder the image the better.

Good news for your garden business, which is visually driven. Plus, images are stored in the long-term memory while simple text is quickly forgotten.

In the upcoming months, invest more time on Instagram (videos and pictures), Pinterest, YouTube and memes.

Daily Deals are Done

80% of marketers are not planning on using daily deal sites like Groupon or LivingSocial next year. 

While the offers continually drive traffic and provide a big boost in business, they are usually up to 50% off, which means little profit for you.

Conversely, while there's the initial big bump, there's been no correlation between daily deals and long-term customers.

Loyal, dedicated customers are the creme de le creme, so if the daily deals aren't producing, marketers are cutting them out of their plans.

Keep Tweetin'

Now, the ever-sought-after 18-29 bracket has moved from Facebook to Twitter and make up 31% of Twitter users!

Facebook is getting left in the dust as the younger demographic wants to move on to the cool new platform. 

Social Sales

As customers continue to follow brands, they no longer want to simply get a coupon from your site. They want to buy from you right then and there.

Facebook already suggests birthday gifts that can be bought and exchanged on the platform. 

In the same way, countless, trending e-commerce websites offer a quick link to tweet out your new purchase--or share with your Facebook friends what you've bought.

We hope you've enjoyed these social media trends!  What trends are you seeing?

Download the 2013 Garden Trends Report too!

A special thanks to Smart Social Media for the 2013 social media image!