The extraordinary potential of social media was apparent from the early 21st Century. Some early frontrunners in the social media sector included companies such as MySpace. For those old enough to remember MySpace, it was a place where people would share photos, music and comments, and then Facebook came along!
MySpace operated long before smartphones, but if you logged in on your PC at home, it was the King of social media for quite a few years. Unfortunately, the world moves forward. MySpace failed to capitalize on the immense capabilities at its fingertips. Their downfall ushered in a new dawn of social media behemoths.
Internet advancements also snowballed into incalculable proportions. In the early 2000s, the only way to access social media was via a laptop or PC. Nowadays, people almost exclusively use phone apps to access social media and speak to their friends.
Immeasurable changes occurred in almost every sector, from retail to finance. Video poker games didn’t exist twenty years ago, and now you can learn plenty about it without leaving the comfort of your home.
Modern Social Media Apps
Apps such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and WhatsApp have been around for a long time. However, newer and more popular social media apps have exploded over the last few years. The most obvious example of this is TikTok.
TikTok shows how popular social media apps are and how there is massive potential for a new social media app to enter the space and become incredibly profitable.
It hasn’t come without its detractors, like anything popular. However, the number of downloads it has amassed is astonishing. With over one billion users in less than half a decade, its rise to prominence has been the cause of many news items and discussions.
TikTok has explicitly been designed for the modern smartphone. Although Instagram started the idea of social media solely for your mobile, TikTok has run with the concept and turned it into a vast platform.
It is now the number one avenue for creators, and the algorithms generate content much quicker than you can get it on other platforms such as Instagram or YouTube. Both of which have a similar idea with their “shorts” sequences.
However, the big four remain Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook.
Social Media of The Future
With TikTok providing a blueprint for a highly successful video-based social media app, you’d expect future successful projects to attempt to follow a similar idea. It is a similar idea to Vine, which proved to be a hit when it was released back in 2013.
However, TikTok has taken the idea to a new dimension. It covers video and music and hosts billions of hours’ worth of content.
As smartphones continue to advance and fewer people use PCs or laptops for social media, many developers have pivoted toward developing a social media brand that operates exclusively via a mobile app. It’s the only way forward, at the moment, anyway.
When you consider that the bulk of social media users are under 30, and these are users who have grown up with mobile phones, this is where the money lies.
The amount of money that is available in digital advertising is astonishing. Some YouTubers, TikTokers, and Instagram influencers are multi-millionaires purely based on the content they share and advertise online. It doesn’t look like this is going to slow down. If anything, it seems like it will continue to increase.
Conclusion
Nobody has a crystal ball. So, who knows what the future brings for these social media apps? All of the main ones we have mentioned today are multi-billion-dollar corporations. They have the money, resources, and research and development arm to pick up on big ideas.
Maybe there could be a complete reversal with social media apps. Maybe people will have enough of it one day and opt to delete all their accounts and have a conversation!
As unlikely as that sounds, nobody knows what could be around the corner. There was a time when MySpace looked like it would take over the world. Likewise, Facebook got to a stage where it was so dominant in the space that there were US committee hearings to discuss how powerful of a presence it had become on the internet.
If these monopolies are broken down within the next few years, and TikTok continues to reign supreme, the whole landscape of social media will change considerably over the next decade.
Many prominent political figures in the US have expressed concerns about the ownership of TikTok. Some have even gone as far as deleting social media apps from their mobile phones altogether.
Unless one comes along to knock TikTok off its perch, it will likely dominate the landscape for the rest of the 2020s.