Facebook and the Current State of Social Media
April 26, 2014Much has been said about the negatives of Facebook. Particularly the seemingly shady practices of their advertising.
The video describes the signal-versus-noise issue that Facebook is running into, both for a user and a brand. As Facebook has so much noise, and the signal Facebook cares about is different than the signal you, as a user, care about. The video then goes on to compare and contrast to YouTube, but we’ll ignore that for now. The same video creator has another video about Facebook and potential advertising click fraud that is also worth taking a glance at.
Social networks seems to have a problem. As Twitter/Vine tries to compete with Facebook/Instagram, Google+ is trying to gain meaningful traction outside of some techies, Google/Android fans and anti-Facebook folks, all-the-while Snapchat is trying to figure out just what it is. Not to mention that Reddit is continuing along strong with very, very few changes beyond its origin years ago, though the argument could be made that Reddit is more of a forum and news aggregator than a social network, but that depends on who you talk to. And don’t forget about LinkedIn, the only one that seems to not be trying to compete with the rest, at least not overtly. There are plenty of others that may have traction in one area and are looking for it in others or are just trying to figure out where to go next: Tumblr, Path, Secret, Whisper, etc.
I don’t think social networks are dying, I’ll be the first to say that, but I do think they’re changing. I read things about why to remove social media buttons and can’t help but agree. That’s one reason I’ve tried to maintain my own blog more recently than being in the silo of a social network.
With the explosion of social media sites, after forums were a mainstay on the internet, made a lot of people really believe that we were seeing a brand-new, connected world. A social world where you could interact with anyone easily and keep track of friends you’ve known for a long time. It seemed like a communication panacea.
MySpace built a better Friendster, Facebook built a better MySpace, Twitter built something different for a different kind of person, Instagram made storytelling easier and Viddy helped people get used to videos that weren’t just on YouTube or Netflix. But everything was just a bigger or better social network where the differences eventually faded away into communicating with text, video, pictures or social approval. They all have these similar characteristics: communicating a story and looking for social feedback.
There are many flavors out there and many secret sauces. No one can get everyone’s preferences right all the time.
