Predicting the Next Big Thing
Date: March 22, 2013Category: Author: Danielle Azar
Part of working in social media is feeling like you’re drowning in the world of Facebook all day long. Every article you read, meeting you attend, podcast you listen to shoves the word “Facebook” down your throat in what they think is a new and interesting perspective. I know the F-word is a behemoth and what most people think of first when they think of social media, but there are other channels out there and more are popping up everyday.
Marketers have long had the habit of observing youth to determine the next hot thing. Now that Facebook has been taken over by big brands and people older than 35, more and more teens and early 20 somethings have abandoned it in favor of simpler, visual platforms that facilitate interaction from their peers. For this age group, Instagram and Snapchat are the new biggies with many teens saying they check into their Facebook just once a week to see if anything important happened or have even abandoned the platform altogether.
Instagram consists of posting pictures of yourself after editing them to apply the most flattering filter of course, with the goal of gathering the most likes, comments, and new followers. You can follow friends and celebrities and see what they’re actually doing in real time. It’s a foolproof way to broadcast yourself requiring little time and less thought, but it’s effective. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand (or million) words.
I had never even heard of Snapchat before 2013, but nowadays it seems like every other social media article I read mentions it. It’s a fun, simple, easy to use mobile app that sends pictures and videos to your friends that expire, meaning the pictures self-destruct after a certain amount of time. It’s not hard to imagine what teens are using that for.
I don’t blame young people for moving away from the F-word. Facebook started out as a cool way for college kids to meet up and connect. Now, it’s been literally taken over by big business and most of the posts in your news feed are ads or too-long posts from your great aunt. In other words, Facebook just isn’t cool anymore. They did make a good move purchasing Instagram last year, but I’ll bet they find a way to ruin it with ads soon enough.
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