Social media has completely changed the manner in which we tend to interact with one another. The thing that makes this industry so influential is that it has become a really important way for people to acquire information as well. However, recent developments have made the future of this industry a bit murkier than before. While it is almost certain that the industry will continue to thrive since it offers a service that will always be in high demand, it is no longer guaranteed that it will look, function or be desired in the same way as previously.
A recent report that was released by App Annie has illuminated certain trends that have been seen in social media platforms and their usage over the past decade or so. It’s safe to say that the previous decade has resulted in a veritable explosion of social media platforms in terms of their user base, so understanding where this boom came from is quite crucial. It can help you to understand the direction in which the industry might be headed, and many social media marketing experts would need this information to predict how their marketing campaigns might be impacted at some point in the future.
This report is called “Evolution of Social Apps”, and one piece of information that it provides about social media has to do with how its user base has changed. If you take a look at consumer spending, you would notice that it has gone up to around $22 billion. This is a massive change by any standards, but it’s made even more impressive by the fact that consumer spending on social media apps and the like was pretty much nonexistent about a decade or so ago.
Another thing to note about this is that the growth has mostly been driven by market expansion in places like Asia as well as Africa. India in particular has been an enormously valuable asset for various social media platforms, and total in app spending has gone well past $6 billion a year thanks to massive growth in that particular region. This shows that the future of social media might lie in these emerging markets rather than the relatively more dependable markets of Europe and North America possibly due to the large populations that are currently living in the aforementioned regions.
This means that a lot of social media platforms are going to be focusing on emerging markets a lot more than they used to. After all, these emerging markets are big money earners for them, and TikTok managed to compete with far more established competitors by focusing on the aforementioned markets first and then moving into established markets next.
How users spend their time on social media is changing as well. Users now spend a total of about 550 billion hours streaming each year, which is far more than the around 380 billion hours that users spend chatting. This seems to indicate that live streaming facilitation will be a much bigger value proposition priority for social media platforms moving forward if they are going to be taking the needs of their customers seriously.
Social media used to be primarily for things like staying in touch with people, but it appears that this type of usage is starting to fade away. The more important feature for users is live streaming and watching other video based content, and we have already seen a number of social media platforms start to move into this space. The changes that occur in the world of social media are going to be somewhat hard to fully predict but it will be truly interesting to see where things go from here. The social media of the next decade might look very different indeed.
Read next: Study Reveals That Search Engine And Digital Video Ads Will Be The Future Of Advertising
A recent report that was released by App Annie has illuminated certain trends that have been seen in social media platforms and their usage over the past decade or so. It’s safe to say that the previous decade has resulted in a veritable explosion of social media platforms in terms of their user base, so understanding where this boom came from is quite crucial. It can help you to understand the direction in which the industry might be headed, and many social media marketing experts would need this information to predict how their marketing campaigns might be impacted at some point in the future.
This report is called “Evolution of Social Apps”, and one piece of information that it provides about social media has to do with how its user base has changed. If you take a look at consumer spending, you would notice that it has gone up to around $22 billion. This is a massive change by any standards, but it’s made even more impressive by the fact that consumer spending on social media apps and the like was pretty much nonexistent about a decade or so ago.
Another thing to note about this is that the growth has mostly been driven by market expansion in places like Asia as well as Africa. India in particular has been an enormously valuable asset for various social media platforms, and total in app spending has gone well past $6 billion a year thanks to massive growth in that particular region. This shows that the future of social media might lie in these emerging markets rather than the relatively more dependable markets of Europe and North America possibly due to the large populations that are currently living in the aforementioned regions.
This means that a lot of social media platforms are going to be focusing on emerging markets a lot more than they used to. After all, these emerging markets are big money earners for them, and TikTok managed to compete with far more established competitors by focusing on the aforementioned markets first and then moving into established markets next.
How users spend their time on social media is changing as well. Users now spend a total of about 550 billion hours streaming each year, which is far more than the around 380 billion hours that users spend chatting. This seems to indicate that live streaming facilitation will be a much bigger value proposition priority for social media platforms moving forward if they are going to be taking the needs of their customers seriously.
Social media used to be primarily for things like staying in touch with people, but it appears that this type of usage is starting to fade away. The more important feature for users is live streaming and watching other video based content, and we have already seen a number of social media platforms start to move into this space. The changes that occur in the world of social media are going to be somewhat hard to fully predict but it will be truly interesting to see where things go from here. The social media of the next decade might look very different indeed.
