Social media has changed our world in more ways than we can imagine. Today, the power of social media cannot be ignored. It can make or break reputations. It can build or destroy businesses. And, if the allegations surrounding the sharing of information during the months preceding the 2016 US Election are anything to go by, social media can make or break governments. Social media has become a platform for not only socializing, entertainment and recreation but also political commentary and self-expression. A definite shift is happening. Social media is evolving.
Social media is changing in many ways. For example, change is happening because of privacy concerns. More people are aware of data harvesting and identity theft issues, and they are adapting their social media use accordingly. Another way the landscape is shifting is in terms of user demographics. Demographically, as a platform becomes more and more popular, fewer and fewer younger people sign up. Take Facebook, for instance. After enjoying massive popularity in its early days, many young people have been leaving the platform for years. Fewer young people bother to sign up today because it is a platform for older people. Today, 30 million Facebook accounts belong to dead people. In 2016, Facebook saw a 21 percent drop in status updates.
So what is the future of social media? And more importantly, what is the future of social media apps? If you want to know how to make a social media app future proof, how would you go about it? Well, these are the questions we seek to answer here.
Focus More On Relationships
Platforms like Facebook began as a network for making and maintaining friendships and relationships. As time went by, things changed. Today it is more about personal brands and grouping people into clusters that take away the human relationship aspect of it all. Social media has become a tool for companies and individuals to advertise themselves. This works well if you want to make an announcement that will reach as many people as possible, but the simplicity of sharing family photos or staying connected with a few people you actually care about has been lost. People and businesses are using almost every asset to getting more followers, and building mini-communities of their own.
The future of social media lies in going back to the basics and refocusing the attention to personal posts, personal photos, and more intimate connections.
More Diverse Personal Posts
Going forward, social media platforms will likely have more diverse options regarding what you can post. Advances in digital technology have made people seek new ways to share their experiences. Apart from text, pictures, and videos, audio will likely play a bigger role in social media apps.
Premium Social Media
Why pay for social media when you have been using it for free this whole time, you ask? Well, for two reasons. People are sick and tired of ads, and most will gladly pay not to get them. Secondly, with the improved quality of content, such as higher quality video, audio and image files, people will want to keep them, for posterity perhaps. And they will gladly pay for the extra storage space on the cloud.
Groups
The volatile 2016 election environment and the slew of social media posts that came with it showed clearly how important it is to group your audience. The ability to decide who sees what post will be even more important. Groups will be essential to maintaining healthy relationships, and social media apps will focus on this.
Focus on Privacy
Privacy concerns are a huge deal today. Several cases of identity theft have made social media companies take this factor very seriously. Tactica believes that the future social media apps will have a better and more advanced network and profile privacy, knowing all the scandals that are happening lately.
Customer Wellness
Social media is famously addictive. It fosters unhealthy habits and is one of the main reasons why people think millennials are lazy. Social media apps will be geared towards weaning their users off some of these unhealthy habits. For example, Youtube’s Time Watched feature is one of the early adopters of this customer wellness geared app development.
Legacy Building
They say once something gets on the internet it can never be erased. Future social media users would not want it to ever be erased. Social media profiles will act as records of an individual’s existence. Social media platforms will no longer be about posting single updates, but rather stories of their lives, like an interactive diary by many authors. If someone has 2 hours to flip through your life, what do you want them to see?
Mobile Nativity
Future Social Media platforms will be designed specifically for mobile users. Mobile users are the largest user base of social media sites, and every platform knows this. Future platforms will be designed for mobile from the start. The apps will be seamlessly integrated with the phones, being built to last.
New social media apps will understand the need for a different approach to social media. A new kind of social networking is needed. Social media needs to enrich our lives instead of making us hate ourselves and others, or tearing us down. Successful social media apps will be the ones that put people first and become assets as opposed to liabilities you can’t shake off.
Bio: Jeff Jones is the Communication Manager of Ztorie, a video stories marketing studio. He has experience in the realm of digital marketing for almost 10 years and is very updated to the latest trends. When he is not working, you can find him socializing physically.
