Information technology advances has changed our life a lot in recent decades. Social media or social networking is a field of life which is greatly affected by these recent IT advancements. Any forum of social media includes any mean of communication and information sharing. In today’s world social media has become a need of the people, and thus it is playing vital role in the development of any society.
Social media is an integral element in any business as humans must communicate to get work done. The influence of technology on social media has been largely beneficial to business. With the help of internet, you can interact with your customers very fast and respond to issues much quickly. Today, the social media apps like Facebook and WhatsApp are used for the sake of advertisement.
This trend has been evolving over the past ten years or so. Newspapers recently were filled with various articles about social media. Those articles were about the Facebook IPO offerings. However that event did bring up the subject of social media in everyone’s mind. It showed how big of a thing this social media event is.
Social media seems to have grabbed hold of everything. Right now it is estimated that there are 140 million active Twitter users in the world and over 500 total users across the world. Facebook has been estimated as having 173 million US users and 835.5 million worldwide. That amounts to 1 in 13 people on the earth. An estimated 90 percent of US Internet users also use Facebook. Two hundred and fifty million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day. A 2010 PEW Research study said that two-thirds of all Americans use the Internet. Now people have dual access to the Internet. Forty percent of those on the Internet also have access to the Internet from their smart mobile phones. This gives people an almost 24/7 degree of access to get information from the web about various important things like where are the open restaurants and it allows something else. Now people have the capability to put out information to the masses about open restaurants and tons of other things.
The frequency of this trend is accelerating upward, unlike the Facebook stock price. According to the Indianapolis Star, Twitter handled 1.8 million tweets on Election Day in 2008. Nowadays the Twitter gets that many tweets every eight minutes. The trends for Facebook users have only gone up year after year. The US increase averages 7 to 8 percent. The world increase for Facebook users shows much the same thing. Facebook has been experiencing a high percentage of growth, double digits usually for the past several years.
It’s difficult to predict anything exactly, but if one thing can be said about the future of social media, it will probably be more personalized and less noisy. Over-sharing will be less of a problem and filtering out irrelevant information will become a stronger trend.
Snapchat is a social media platform that’s really at the forefront of social media evolution. Rather than blasting out updates for all our friends and followers to see, we use Snapchat more like we communicate in real life — with specific people only at specific times.
Other big social networks like Instagram and Facebook have also taken inspiration from Snapchat for its stories feature, integrating nearly identical features into their own platforms so users have the opportunity to share quick photos or short videos that are only available to view for 24 hours.
If anything, social media is probably about to move more toward ephemeral sharing for quicker, more intimate sharing without the stress of having to blast something out to hundreds or thousands of followers that stays up there unless it’s manually deleted. The pressure of garnering tons of likes and comments on regular social media posts also plays a huge factor, suggesting that more casual forms of social sharing, such as through stories, could be the social media way of the future.
