What will the future of social media be like?

Social media sites come and go, the current major sites are vastly different to those in the past. Myspace for example failed due to its lack of innovation, it had no instant messaging, there were large amounts of spam messages and links. Connecting to people was harder due to the programmes lack of connectivity to email lists. Other once popular sites failed for reasons such as; too corporate, out of touch, poor service, lack of change, for example; Bebo, Digg ect.

The main reasons seem to be around not giving the customer what it wants. Many social media sites are accused of 'selling out' to advertising. Social media advertising is more popular year on year, Facebook has reported a 66% increase in advertising revenue, much of this coming from mobile ads.

Research by Upstream claims that 27% of British Facebook users and 20% of American users would stop using the site if they get too much advertising. Facebook has been under massive pressure to become more profitable when it went on the stock market, especially on mobile devices. The emphasis on ROI for business on social media is important for many stakeholders and the pressure can result in higher advertising levels.

During April 2014 Facebook changed their page rankings so that paid ads have a much higher visibility level that non-paid organisations. The changes affected fansites especially, for example popular Facebook group 'Welcome to the Internet' noticed a 70-80% decline in page views. Whilst other organisations who paid to views noticed huge increases in visibility and ROI.

Additionally, Facebook is making a change to page status updates that include a link within the update. Now, including a link in the text status update for page will automatically embed a photo and a snippet from the pager article into the post:





































Facebook said these types of updates get more engagement in terms of likes, comments, shares, and clicks, adding that they are more visually compelling than a text-only status update with a link. While some businesses will embrace this change, others probably won’t be so happy about it being default.

Many new social media sites are running ad free to combat giants such as Facebook, for example Pinterest, Google+, even Twitter has less advertising. These sites are growing fast and the 'freedom' from ads and corporate culture users have is a refreshing lift.

Here are a few examples;

Google+

 

Twitter;

 

Facebook;

As a result the users experience of Facebook and other platforms will suffer, many people want a 'clean'page, only showing results they chose or are interested in. Business want long term marketing campaigns, and with growth rates for social media changing ensuring the business are advertising in the right places is crucial. Business focus on building a fan-base on social media, this allows marketing to reach more people. Sites such as Twitter endorse this and enable it to happen.

From above we can see that the larger, more commercial sites are declining in popularity (Facebook, YouTube). Whilst smaller platforms with less ads are growing rapidly and taking market share.

The key for a longer lasting social media platform is having the right balance between social experience and advertising.