Popular Social Media

Social Media Platforms to be aware of :

The advent of the popular social media site Facebook has catapulted our society into an era of unprecedented access to information and connectivity. There are arguments to be made for social media’s advantages and disadvantages, but no one can deny that it has significantly changed how our world works. Social media constantly evolves, and different sites quickly fall into an out-of-style. For example, sites that used to be popular, like MySpace, have since been replaced by other more modern platforms, such as Twitter and Instagram. If you could board this media-hype train and create a popular site, you would undoubtedly have become wealthy. After all, social media marketing’s importance has become a defacto for online marketing! The following sites are good examples of social media platforms that every professional or small business should consider.

Following is a list of social media platforms that seem prominent in online social.

Snapchat

Snapshot is an up-and-coming popular social media platform. A service that allows you to share short clips of whatever you may be doing at the time with your friends. Snapchat is what I would consider the most “hip” of the social media options available now. It was released recently (2011) and has started gaining popularity in the past few years. Snapchat is easy to use, which is one reason for its popularity. A recent trend for social media seems to have been cutting out excess features and keeping their apps as simple as possible. This is evidenced by older social media, especially MySpace, which allowed its users nearly endless customizability and caused some people to make their “space” completely unusable.

Shots

Another up and popular social media site that could gain popularity soon is called Shots. Shots were released to the public in 2013, and since then, have accumulated over 5 million registered users. This app allows you to share links from around the internet and share “selfies,” a recent trend where you take pictures of yourself. Twitter, another social media powerhouse, recently tried to acquire Shots, but the owner has stated that the company is not for sale. This is another excellent example of a site that does away with many unnecessary features seen on other sites and simplifies them to make them more accessible.

Another Popular Social Media Platform for dating is Tinder.

Tinder was released in 2012 and has become a popular social media service. Generally, it’s a dating app that utilizes “swipes” of its users to create potential matchups. You make a profile of yourself with some basic information and pictures, and other people with profiles will then be able to see your own. They can either “swipe left” if they don’t like the person or “swipe right” if they are interested in meeting with said person. If the other person also “swipes right,” then the app will pair these two users, and they can begin chatting and make plans to meet up if they so desire. 

Slide Share

When you think of social media, you typically relate it to young adults using their cell phones. Not all social media sites are aimed at teens. Here’s one that a broad crowd of people could use. It’s called “Slideshare.” Slideshare is an app that allows you to transfer PowerPoint from one another. LinkedIn acquired it in 2012, an app that helps you manage your professional identity and network. At the beginning of 2015, more than 40% of B2B marketers reported using this platform for content distribution. This social media platform allows marketers to post and share their research, product, and ideas with fellow marketers and future business partners. It is also a good app for students and professors, allowing students to share slides with classmates for group projects.

Peach

With social media sites like Snapchat and Instagram blowing up within the last few years, up-and-coming apps have stiff competition to become popular. A new app called “Peach” might change the game. Peach was created by Dom Hofmann, the co-founder of the video-sharing app called Vine, in 2012. Overall, it’s a social-journaling app with many aspects that Facebook, Path, Slack, and Snapchat have. With this app, you can chronologically journal your days, and the app gives you access to “magic words” to help you document it and share it uniquely. You can also draw on blank canvases, say “good morning” by sharing the time, weather, and temperature, and use songs by using the microphone on your phone or computer to recognize songs like the app “Shazam” does. Also, you want to give a friend or stranger a rating on their post. You can give them 1-5 stars. This app is bound to turn heads and could become more popular than Instagram due to its neat features.

Slack

An app called “Slack” is an instant messaging and collaboration system. Founder Stewart Butterfield created the app at the end of 2012. By 2013, he and his team had enough to work with to use the products themselves. Generally, the app is meant for “team communication,” which offers a lot of functionality. Slack offers channels to help you focus on separate and direct messages, so you don’t have to include the entire team, a robust search functionality to find key concepts, and you can share your files amongst your team. This new app will allow students, business teams, companies, support groups, and many more to communicate.

Periscope

Another growing aspect of popular social media is live video-streaming apps like Periscope and YouNow. These services let users show a live feed from their device to other users browsing the app or the website.

The Periscope was named by Apple the iPhone app for 2015 and was featured on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Dec 18th, 2015. Users watch over 40 years’ worth of content in a given day, and with ten million accounts, it’s one of the most extensive live-streaming services centered around social media. After a partnership with GoPro, users can stream directly to the Periscope service from their GoPro device. They added support for live-streaming from flying drones on May 13th of this year. PeriscopeTV, a community-driven offshoot of Periscope, intends to create a first-person news and information service for users.

YouNow

YouNow is a service founded in 2011 by Adi Sideman, who holds a master’s degree in interactive communications from New York University. In an interview with Slate Magazine, he described the conditions that led to the founding of YouNow “All of a sudden, everybody has a camera in their pocket. There’s Wi-Fi everywhere. Social networks allow people to distribute their content. We were all becoming broadcast stations.” (Hess, 2015). YouNow users are now recording over 150,000 broadcasts per day, and the average user watches 51 minutes of content per day. The app is also quickly expanding, with over 100 million user logins per month as of Dec 2015.

Cons of Live Streaming

Unfortunately, one of the darker aspects of live streaming is that it can distribute taboo or criminal media. Recently, Periscope made news when a 19-year-old French woman live-streamed her suicide using the app. Another 17-year woman is accused of live-streaming the rape of her friend by a 29-year-old mutual friend. She and the accused rapist are in court on charges of kidnapping, rape, sexual battery, and pandering sexual matters involving a minor. The prosecutor has been quoted as saying that the woman live-streaming the rape was ‘caught up in the likes,’ referring to the positive feedback she received for her stream from other users. The Periscope platform bans’ explicit, graphic content, but the scope of how many users are on the service and how much content is being generated each day make it a Sisyphean task to regulate it.

Positives of Live Streaming

There are positives from live-video streaming apps like Periscope and YouNow. With GoPro and drone integration a reality, it’s elementary to see incredible sights and reach rarely visited places without traveling to streamed destinations. Internet tourism may become a real thing via these apps. I wouldn’t be surprised if an interactive service that could send messages to the streamer to guide their behavior were available within a few years. Another positive is that this enables law enforcement to catch the truly stupid, as in the case of the Florida woman arrested for live-streaming her drunken driving. These apps allow us to preemptively stop reckless behavior like this before it takes the lives of nearby innocents.

Tumblr

One of the more popular social media platforms in use today. According to TechCrunch. Tumblr is America’s youth’s favorite social networking site for ages 25 and under. The app allows users to repost pictures or quotes they feel relate to their life or character. People have said that “Tumblr became huge because it is the anti-blog.” People don’t want others except a few close friends to view their page because they post their deep feelings. So you would most likely not report the same pictures on Twitter as you do on Tumblr because you have less privacy on Tumblr.

Final Thoughts on Popular Social Media

Social media is very diverse and very popular with all demographics. It has made our world all more connected and easier to communicate with. But it also brings out a negative side because real-life interaction has dwindled. After all, we are constantly preoccupied with our devices and such applications. Instead of being open to people, we throw all our feelings and thoughts online. Overall, social media will continue to grow and expand as people crave new ways to express themselves. Maybe there will be a time when real life and social media interaction could be consolidated and work hand in hand.