Will social media remain the same again?
$Tesla (TSLA.US)$ CEO Elon Musk recently bought over $Twitter (Delisted) (TWTR.US)$ in a USD44 billion deal.
Twitter and the company formerly known as Facebook once dominated social media, but now both of them face uncertain futures. Twitter took on USD13 billion in debt to complete the Musk deal. Facebook parent $Meta Platforms (META.US)$ will spent tens of billions from 2021- 2023 to transform to a metaverse company while its main Facebook app struggles to remain relevant to younger users.
Twitter will layoff half of its staff and Meta may also let go thousands of employees.
Upstart social networks with sophisticated AI-powered recommendation engines such as short-form video site TikTok, unfiltered photo app BeReal, chat app Discord, and video streaming app Twitch are competing to stake their claims as the next social media companies to rule the world. That means companies that once defined social media could become irrelevant.
Remember Friendster and MySpace? They are previous versions of social media that have faded or disappeared over time.
Meta and Twitter are struggling to figure out their business models.
There's no guarantee the metaverse will take off. According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta expected to have 500,000 users in its main Horizon Worlds app by the end of this year. It since lowered expectations to just 280,000, since fewer than 200,000 people use the service.
Meanwhile, Musk is trying to figure out how to properly monetize Twitter, with ideas ranging from charging USD8 to USD20 per month for verified users, to growing its other subscription service effort.
TikTok continues to gain on Meta and leave Twitter in the dust. According to data.ai, TikTok grew at a faster rate than Meta, exploding by 45% from 1.1 billion to nearly 1.6 billion between Q1 2021 and Q1 2022. The larger Meta grew by just 5% in the same period.
Twitter has just 238.7 million monetizable daily active users, its measurement of users that it says see ads on the platform.
TikTok's growth stems in part from its AI-powered For You page, a continuous stream of short videos that match up with users' interests that Meta is trying to replicate on Facebook.
BeReal promises a new kind of social media experience where users share content with friends that's meant to be spontaneous rather than the manufactured look of posts on Instagram and TikTok. That's helped push the app's popularity from 756,000 downloads in Jan 2022 to 14.7 million downloads in Sep 2022, according to SensorTower.
The world of social media is more fragmented than ever.
When Facebook and Twitter began in 2004 and 2006, respectively, social media was just starting. As Facebook exploded in users, jumping from 305 million monthly users in Sep 2009 to 1 billion three years later, Twitter became the place for high-profile figures.
But the upstarts of social media platforms - TikTok, Discord, Twitch - offers tailored social media experiences and a chance to join a service your grandparents don't use.
Social network trends resemble those in fashion. They take off, their popularity soars, and then a new generation of consumers decides those platforms aren't cool anymore. And that's exactly what's happening at Facebook, Meta's photo-sharing site Instagram, and Twitter. They have declined in popularity.
According to an Aug 2022 Pew survey, just 32% of teens say they use Facebook app, down from the 71% who said they used the app in a similar survey of teens conducted between 2014 and 2015.
While 62% of teens say they use Instagram, 67% report using its enemy's TikTok.
Facebook originally was for younger people and now it's for their parents.
Social media will never be the same again.
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Lion not lamb : Social media will improve over time as all opinions are allowed to be expressed
RDK79 : WWon't change much as there are wackos, extreme left and right, and lawyers.
straightforward Jack RDK79 : Amen.