The beginning or near the end of Social Media?
So we are all in agreement that social media is alive and kicking and has a strong grip on a growing number of adults across the UK, more people spending more time on these platforms being the constant reports of independent surveys.
We do from time to time hear that certain stats showing that the popularity of some platforms are fading, recently Facebook being one of the major portals where it was rumoured that membership figures are down, or at least the rate of growth is decreasing. So, is social media slowing down and coming to an end, or is it just beginning?
Time flies and it is already approximately 10 years that we have had social media in our lives and in the last 3-4 years it has been firmly adopted by businesses and media channels as one of the most responsive marketing techniques for their products and services. Is it now time that we are all a little too bored with likes, tweets, hashtags and shares in our lives – Are we now in need of something new?
Social media still has many new advancements up it’s sleeve with the likes of Pinterest and Twitter venturing in to allowing users to sell products on their platforms by sharing images / tweets opening up a whole new selling channel for businesses to take advantage of. This would suggest that we’ve still someway to go with social media, with many new additions for them to offer us still and keep us onboard and importantly for businesses, new ways for us to spend money whilst spending time on them.
So, is social media soon to be a thing of the past? What about me sticking my neck out and saying “can we live without social media now, has it too much of an important part in our lives“? We can now sit on the sofa whilst watching television with a second screen in our hands (our mobile phones, tablets, laptops) and catch up with the latest in news, what our friends/family are upto, view promotions from our loved brands, order takeaway food, engage with popular TV shows via hashtags and even tweet directly to the celebrities and stars themselves. Surely this form of communication, social media, has no chance of leaving us anytime soon?
I reckon 2015 will see the spending by the big corporations being increased for social media, surveys will report that consumer spending on social media will show positive upward figures that it will soon be rivaling spending via websites. There will be many more news stories shared on businesses being launched and becoming successful purely via social media, maybe we’ll have more and more ‘social media millionaires’.
I can certainly share that I meet more and more people / small businesses that are growing their profits from social media, many people have the likes of Youtube channels that bring in £1,000’s every month from advertising revenues or have Twitter accounts / Facebook groups that they can charge to share content across them. One person has a LinkedIn group of over 200,000 within one industry sector and has it sponsored by a national company.
Property search activity will increase on social media and no doubt there’ll be more platforms / softwares launched to take advantage of consumers spending leisure and research time on social media. Rightmove, Zoopla and other major property portals will stay and rightly so have their strong hold in the industry, but I am sure they will be investing more time in to social media and making things easier for property listings to be found – They’ll want to be on the channels that their target audience are frequenting (I am sure that estate agents will want them to be most active on the most active channels).
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