4 Shocking Social Media Trends
The believe it or not list on recent social media trends – do tell us what you think and what are your predictions on what’s to come on the social media scene.
The believe it or not list on recent social media trends – do tell us what you think and what are your predictions on what’s to come on the social media scene.
It seems like Twitter – the second largest social networking website, is poised to become some sort of an online shopping platform. On February 11th, Twitter announced its partnership with American Express to release a payment-by-tweet feature. Twitter believes that by becoming an e-commerce website, it will be able to attract more advertising revenues in the future.
When the Timeline was released to replace the old Facebook profile design, there was enormous backlash from Facebook users. Now that people seem to be settling in with Timeline and giving positive feedback to the Timeline design, reports suggest that Facebook will be changing Timeline sometime soon. The original Timeline displayed posts and Milestones in two columns. Some users complained that this design forced them to look back and forth to see all the posts.
Twitter has just launched three updated features that are focused on content discovery via mobile devices. These updates ensure that mobile users will find one single stream of content in each tab, making it easier to find and engage with content on Twitter. Twitter officially announced these changes to mobile.twitter.com and other changes to Android and iOS apps on their blog on 6th February, 2013. The updated tabs are called Search, Connect and Discover. So now, users logging into Twitter via their mobile devices will be able to search and view more information easily and quickly from all of these tabs.
Facebook is the largest social network in the world with over a billion active users and Google has monopolized the search engine world with over 67% of the market share. It comes as no surprise that these two companies do not talk of each other in glowing terms. The rivalry between these two companies began when Facebook decided to form a close partnership with Google’s competitor – Microsoft, with Microsoft having a 1.6% stake in Facebook. Till last year, the acrimonious relationship between Facebook and Google was only speculated upon by Internet users and fuelled by social media reporters as both sides decided to remain quiet on the issue.
Marketing is a complex and confusing activity, especially for small businesses and start-ups. Most entrepreneurs are looking to make business contacts and attract a more professional audience. LinkedIn is a great platform for this purpose.
Just when Twitter users were dealing with the news that Instagram was pulling out, Pinterest’s recent announcement is bound to bring some cheer. Instagram users may not be able to share their images on Twitter again but they can start using Pinterest instead. The pinboard-based photo sharing service recently added support for Twitter cards. This will allow people to see Pinterest images in the Twitter feed itself. They will not have to leave Twitter and follow the link to Pinterest to view the images.
The change or the rise in social media is unmatched by any other Internet phenomenon. To put things in perspective, within a span of seven years – between 2005 and 2012 – social networking sites have gone from their being in their nascent stages to being the most popularly visited sites on the Internet. Most importantly, social networks have now moved onto the mobile platform in a big way.
Seth Godin, famed entrepreneur and public speaker, answers this question – What do we do every day? According to Seth, individuals try to change things in their lives. Regardless of the fact that every person is different, most of us try to change something that bothers us or we think needs to be changed. We try to take necessary steps towards a permanent change. As Seth says, this fact has not been acknowledged and has gone unnoticed.
Facebook has been trying to capture the image-sharing market in the social networking world and as a result, recently bought Instagram. As a clear indication of the social network war going on between Facebook, Instagram and Twitter; Instagram has stopped allowing its pictures to be displayed in Twitter timelines. Kevin Systrom – co-founder of Instagram, announced in the first week of December that his company will be dropping support for Twitter cards completely in some time. This change means that Instagram photos will not be displayed in Tweets or photo galleries of users.
Every Internet user is a part of one or the other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and new social networking platforms are launched almost daily. The social networking world is evolving everyday and developers are finding new ways to bring users together. One small start-up has figured out a way to gather new users around a specific type of content and their common interests. Sulia – is a new subject-based social service that let’s you follow topics that you are interested in instead of following other users. For example, you can follow all the content about your favorite local football team instead of separate team-related users.
Pinterest, the website where users could pin their favorite pictures, is now slowly going commercial. This elegant website was originally created for users to keep electronic scrapbooks. However, it is now following in the footsteps of Twitter and Facebook and is allowing businesses to create company pages. Pinterest has stated that this update has nothing to do with monetizing the website but to improve user experience and to help companies reach a bigger audience.