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Social Media: The End or The Beginning


Think about this: in fifty years from now, or even thirty years, what will become of social media? Will our kids have social media? If so, what apps will be popular? Right now, social media is one of the biggest forms of communication in our society today. With all of this, the true question I ask myself is “Is social media at its peak right now?” Personally, I don’t think it is because as years have gone on, more and more people have joined social media and it the past five years it has gotten much more popular.

According to a Forbes article “this year (2020) is likely the last one ever in which you can say that more than half the planet is not on social media”. I think that social media is still growing, and it is not at its peak yet. Hootsuite, a social media management company, conducted one of the largest digital state of the art reports. In this report, they concluded that 3.8 billion people, who is 49% of the world, are active social media users. It grew 9% from the year 2019. With the growth and momentum that Hootsuite documented, in 2021, we are likely to see more than 50% of the planet on social media: perhaps as many as four billion people. 

Social Media networks are becoming even more popular, that even some brands have ditched their websites and completely switched to social media networks. Social media isn’t even solely just posting pictures and getting likes either, it is sharing tips and tricks, promoting services, buying good, and so much more. The Marketing Insider Group proclaims that “today, social platforms are selling not just brand coverage, engagement, and visibility, but also very concrete indicators of direct sale”. The original function of social networks, which were created to allow users to find their old friends online, is the restoration of relations. Well, social networks have changed the direction of development. Now they act as an online representation of a person or a company, giving a chance to form a personal brand. This affects the behavior of the users and their needs and requires new services. Many of the recent developments – the search for information, files storage, the ability to edit images, the ability to lead a blog in social networks, geosocial services – are already in great demand. For many users, social networks are almost a synonym for the Internet.


In another Forbes article “What Could Social Media Look Like in 2022 And Beyond?”, Jordan Lintz, the owner and co-founder of High Key Enterprises LLC, writes about how there are two up and coming trends that will define what social media looks like in years to come. The first trend is called Decentralized Platforms. In this vision of the future of social media, users could have direct access to these decentralized platform’s algorithms. Lintz writes, “I believe that social media is bound to become an even freer space in the future, while also allowing content creators to have full ownership of their following and the investments willingly offered by their following base”. The new kind of social media platform that could dominate the industry in the future will be premised on a decentralized model. The second up-and-coming trend is investing in brands and influencers.

Many well-known companies, from food manufacturers to large automotive companies, are already actively communicating with customers through apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Some brands have even ditched their website completely and switched to social media networks.

Some other trends and developments that the Marketing Insider Group came up with that will affect social media and our lives include “the convergence of computers, mobile devices, TVs, home appliances, etc., the development of analysis technologies for huge structured and unstructured data, focus on interactive media – the media that provides an opportunity not only to consume but also participate, get involved and act. Such media will become the main channel for obtaining and sharing information for Z generation that doesn’t watch TV, doesn’t read newspapers/magazines, and doesn’t listen to the radio”. The development of robotics and artificial intelligence algorithms, which form the basis of modern informational, entertainment, recommendatory and other services is another development in the coming years to social media. These will affect how social media platforms work and possibly help with the development of new ones.

Now, whether these trends are successful or not, social media is still going to become a place where it is more about brands and consumers rather than how it was eleven years ago when social media was about a decade ago especially Instagram when it first launched in 2010.

Looking back at when Instagram first came out shows me now just how much it has already changed. I remember when I first got Instagram, it was just a little brown icon that looked like a camera. I was probably around eight or nine and because it was so new, I remember my mom telling me to never use my real name or else bad people will find me. So, as an eight-year-old, obviously my username was going to be “ghostbus23”, (I mean what else would it be). I would post the most random pictures of anything that seemed interesting. I had about ten followers and to be honest, I did not even know what the big deal with followers was. But, as I got older and social media was becoming more prominent in my life, it became more of a popularity contest. I was probably in middle school when I realized how much my friends cared about how many followers they had. It was a bizarre concept to me because I truly didn’t care that much.

During my four years of high school, it turned less of a contest with followers and more of a contest with likes. I fell into this trap of comparison when my friends and I would post a picture and mine wouldn’t get as many likes as theirs did. It was brutal sometimes. Near the end of high school, is when social media became more of a buyer and consumer platform. More ads were faced on my explore page and it was less about posting a picture and see who’s getting more likes, although, I still to this day I stop myself from checking to see how many likes my friends got. We have been on social media since we have been able to not even comprehend the idea of social media and growing up with it, has its benefits and its downside. Another example how social media is changing is by looking at the app TikTok, that was once called Musical.ly.

The DIY music-video app came on scene in 2014 but didn’t explode until 2015. It was a 15-second video app where people were most commonly were shown lip-syncing or dancing to top hit songs. It never fell below the top 40, often swapping places in the app store with Instagram and Snapchat. More than 10 million people used the app daily and produced around the same number of videos daily. All in, 70 million people had registered as Musical.ly users. Due to loss in money by the original founders of Musical.ly though, the company was acquired for around $1 billion in November 2017. In August 2018, TikTok absorbed Musical.ly, and all Musical.ly accounts were automatically migrated to TikTok. Video and graphical information have always been more poular than text. That is why Instagram and Pinterest are now actively developed and used. Visual contents are now growing faster than any other medium with the rise of Snapchat and TikTok.

TikTok is now one of the most popular – and most interesting – social media apps on the planet, but it has yet to enter the lexicon of most average Americans. It has grown massively because of its gist. Users can film as long as a three-minute video either lip-syncing, acting out comedy sketches, or basically doing whatever they want. Viral dances and bizarre trends that have been seen all over the world have been started on this app. Therefore, the app has grown so massively. Some statistics of the app include “[i]n September 2018, it surpassed Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat in monthly installs in the app store, and was downloaded more than a billion times in 2018”.

What this all means is that TikTok isn’t just the latest app you need to pretend to have heard of to impress Gen Z – it’s one of the most important companies on the planet, and it’s at the forefront of the possible future of social media. TikTok has even already started one of the trends that we hear Lintz talk about. It’s called the Creator Fund. While creators were always able to make money via brand deals and other endeavors, there originally lacked a direct way to make money from video views. That changed when they launched the Creator Fund of $200 million which was designed to support growing creators on the app monetarily. Shortly after announcing it, the fund was then predicted to grow to $1 billion in the US over the next years and double that across the globe.

Social media is completely not at its peak yet. We don’t know how long social media will last, but I can tell you that even if social media as we know it today is nonexistent, there will always be a form of communication that people can connect through. There is no doubt that social media is changing and developing into a more modern form of technology, but it won’t go away. Networks will change. They’ll evolve. New ones will emerge. Older ones will die out. But consumer behavior – and the desire to connect and communicate online via networks – is forever here to stay. Users are not leaving social media anytime soon.