Many people who work from home are freelancers that constantly browsing through the different outsource marketplaces for the latest online jobs available. It is very important for these freelancers to recognize what are the recent prominent trends from the industry to understand their best work options.

The online outsourcing marketplace, Freelancer.com, has released recently its list of the top 50 freelance job trends for the fourth quarter of 2011 (press release and PDF). It gathered the stats from 134,820 online jobs that posted over the last quarter of the year, which represent 18.3% job posting increase from the prior quarter.

Important Trending Freelance Jobs (Full List At The Bottom):

Data- Data entry freelance jobs (54% growth) and Microsoft Excel jobs (51% growth) are the fastest growing online jobs of the quarter. Their increase is mostly attributed to many entrepreneurs that are hiring freelancers for market research, analysis and for more information services. Data processing jobs also had a meaningful increase of 39%.

Mobile- There is a significant rising for almost all mobile-related freelance jobs. Android jobs jumped by 33%, iPad jobs rose by 22%, iPhone jobs grew by 18% and general mobile phone jobs grew by 12%, all in great volumes. Other big jumpers, however in low volumes, were Kindle jobs (27%). Freelance jobs for Nokia provided a big drop of 19%.

Programming- Programing-related freelance jobs also had an amazing quarter which provided more jobs for developers of C++ (38% increase), Java (36% increase), C (27% increase), .NET (27% increase) and C# (20%). PHP jobs, which has the most demand on the marketplace in general, grew by 13%.

Social Networking- Overall, this industry keeps growing gradually. Facebook jobs are up by 29%, Twitter jobs are up by 16% and general social networking jobs are up by 26%. Although Google+ jobs didn’t enter the top 50 list (too low volume), they began appearing on the marketplace for the first time. MySpace jobs generated a big fall of 35%, reflecting on the poor social network status.

Writing- The Google Panda algorithm is still showing his signs. Low-quality (considered) freelance writing jobs such as ghostwriting jobs (down 21%) and travel writing jobs (down 47%!) are dropping while high-quality (considered) freelance writing jobs such as academic writing jobs (up 42%) are skyrocketing.

Here is the full top 50 growing freelance job trends list for the fourth quarter of 2011: