Social Media In The Near Future

Facebook, one of the most widely used websites in the world ranks second following, Google. Having an enormous viewership of 552 million users per day and 995 million users per month, notably a very young organization compared to its peers. One in every 13 people around the world checks their Facebook profile each day.

Facebook is the trend setter and the center of attraction at the present, but at the same time has an equal chance to be easily overtaken by other social media companies in the very future. Facebook's power to connect people could be easily overridden by Google's already strong social network combined with its brand new augmented reality- 'Project Glass'. Google’s far-reaching services may even remove Facebook without trace making it an obsolete platform lacking dynamic flexibility.

Below is a graph which portrays the average time spent by Facebook users worldwide,

China ranks first among the countries with most internet users with India occupying the third place. India is the second densely populated country in the world, yet never spikes high in the above chart. Factors that add to India’s lower level graphical representation in the graph are:

·         Indians never access Facebook during their office hours

·         Comparatively high costs of smartphone and iPad in India compared to the U.S.

These factors are likely to change by 2014.

Social media advertising

When it comes to social media advertising, Facebook aims at building brand awareness and building word of mouth fan-base. It is not necessary that all ads that you place on Facebook convert into profitable business leads, since the domain engages only people who dig in to revive/retrieve their friendship circles and not necessarily of those who have a business development motive/ intent to go places seeking opportunities. Business lead generation and output is only possible when Facebook lands their advertising plans into a much more serious and professional and alternate domain page.

When it comes to LinkedIn, the exposure would be very low, but the conversion rate would be solid. They never fall into a follow-up or waiting or no-further-response category. Whereas, in case of Google, response and intimation rate will be very high but notable conversions into business deals is very rare, ending up in pipe line after negotiation and hold back.

Customer satisfaction VS social media sites 

According to the American Customer Satisfaction Survey, Google+ and Wikipedia outsmart all the other social media platforms, proving it to be people's favorite merely a year since its launch. The major reason behind Facebook’s pull-back was the Timeline feature it added to the homepage of users. Despite the visionary approach that Facebook had to enhance their user’s wall page, most Facebook users were completely ignorant about it. More ad space set to the already clumsy looking home page was another blunder, which was somehow beneficial to advertisers and not to regular users. Meanwhile, Google+ added fantastic features like updates in Gmail, circles and hangouts that turned out to speak for better user-experience, surging their fan rate.

See the pie-chart below which shows customer satisfaction with the respective social media sites,

What about social media’s future?

A recent study states that 81% of the consumers trust their grocery stores to share their personal information with, more than social media sites. They are ready to share their details with their local merchants (for them to advertise new products), whereas feel Facebook or Google or others never to be trust worthy and a nightmare.

Social media is a trustworthy and effective platform for people to engage with personally as well as for business nerds looking to develop an efficient and inexpensive advertising campaign. Share only the information you feel is not going to hurt you in any other possible way. Building appropriate knowledge over these sites and identifying the intention behind their existence leads to exciting results in your venture.