Social Media Trends

As the graph below clearly shows, social media are on the rise. Networks such as Facebook and other social media sites now measure their members not in millions but in dozens of millions. Twitter is an up and coming force. In the wake of such successes millions of social media sites have sprung up. Clearly the next big thing in social media would have to be something incredible or be populated very quickly by becoming a buzz, attracting celebrities and such, attracting media-attention and growing by somekind of hype or fluke. The Social Media Market in itself has become harder to penetrate on the basis of a social network site as a business model for it’s own sake. The market has been completely saturated mainly because it takes huge scale to make money from a network as a pure business model.

Graph 1: Twitter vs. Facebook

Source:Compete

The largest of the networks Facebook has recently tried to close of this top segment of the social networking industry even further by the buying and expected incorporating of the FriendFeed service to counter such succesful upstarts as Twitter.

At some point someone at Facebook saw the success of Twitter and then came up with something that must have looked like this:

Graph 2: Social Media & Micro-Blogging

Source: The HOB.Biz

The internet- and social media market are behaving in this sense as any other market: large players can on the basis of their position and (expected) market share (growth), buy competetive advantages to strategically counter perceived threats and protect the marketshare, the scale necessary for such a position. Following this trend of market-leader Facebook all kinds of social media (including our own network) have incorporated Micro-Blogging and/or status-updates. Ofcourse these features do not have the same cult-status and feel as the Twitter application.

So who wins: capital (Facebook) or culture (Twitter). Clearly marketleader Facebook saw the growing Cult/Hype of Twitter as a threat and in defense of it’s position bought FriendFeed (an excellent service by the way). It all depends on the way Facebook implements the integration with Friendfeed: is it going to be an imaginitive service or a boring extension?

At the same time the market has been democratized. Billions of people have internet connections and technology has advanced towards being more and more userfriendly to such an extent that almost anyone can create a social network. No serious internet user is a member of only one single network any more. Some companies have specialized in social media aggregation services (notably: Ping.fm) and the purchase of FriendFeed can help Facebook to defend against this strategic threat as well.

3 Principles of Social Media Adoption

So with this type of Titanic struggle at the top of the Social Media Market as a backdrop: what does it all mean for small new networks, personal and/or business?

First of all: if you’re in it for the money: don’t start a social media network who’s business model is dependent on huge amounts of visitors/ members. The chances that you will be the next Facebook or Twitter are negligable/ comparable to playing the lottery. So choose a different business model, for example one that has a service or customer retention purpose for your Social Media Network in support of another activity.

Second of all: it’s easier then ever to create your own social network at virtually no cost although if you are doing it for business you should probably build on more then just common sense and get advice from a professional.

Third of all: Unless you have a technical or conceptual innovation which will blow everyone’s mind such as Twitter did and you have some hope of creating and surviving your own hype without being copied or bought, you should instead focus on a carefully defined niche market and optimize your processes and services for that niche in a way that surpasses the capabilities or attention of any large company.

This advice is not based on the typical features of the internet or social media market, but is true of most markets that reach a level of maturity where a number of large players consolidate the market.

Clearly this commercial instrumental use of social media as a means instead of an end in itself is an interesting avenue to persue although it may destroy some of the personal, experimental, anarchistic and fun features of internet-communities it seems inevitable.

This inevitability is explainable from the same market-principles as are illustrated in the product-lifecycle graph for Social Media above.

Inevitability Of Instrumental Adoption Of Social Media

Internet itself had something of an original, anarchistic and creative flair when it was first starting to spread more widely in the early ninetees. Experiments that were largely bankroled and if succesful bought out by larger corporations and typical of a phase of creative destruction at the start of the adoption of any new technology. Innovators, Early adopters are always changing their focal points for the next best thing and the odd Idealist who thought internet was going to be a freehaven could have guessed from the origins of internet that some economic purpose was being served in this phase: the diversion of risk as well as the exploring of possibilities in more creative environments then the typical corporation can offer.

In fact in order to mimic the creative success of startups there was a phase where corporations, still minimizing risk and maximizing benefits, started semi-detached incubator companies specifically to explore the possibilities of the internet in which they owned controlling shares. It’s simply a given in our society’s structure that the succesful ones are bought and incorporated (FriendFeed) or themselves grow to become corporations such as Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Apple before them in the previous technological wave of creative destruction.

Brick and mortar businesses have embraced the internet long ago and most businesses have even embraced social media and are finding ways to leverage the power of Social Media for Business. MLM’s and spammers are at the forefront of this movement towards the commercialization of the internet and still offer interesting experimental models from time to time. When the excesses of this “movement” are legislated away and a number of useful models remain these will be text-book cases for future social media marketeers and incorporated into normal everyday corporate business practice.

Democratization Of Development and Distribution

Usually corporations are not trend setters but defenders of market share: capital demands stabilty and growth and Google and Facebook are perfectly predictable corporations: not revolutionary movements. From the incubator phase the internet-market has now moved into a direction where individuals develop applications for the platforms that the corporations provide. Development has become so (relatively) simple that there is no telling where the next great idea is going to come from. Corporations now have access to innovations at the ground level and developers have an opportunity to find a market more easily and quickly because of the scale of the corporation’s platforms. In this sense internet has delivered on it’s promise of making markets more transparent and yet it’s harder to predict for everyday consumers and entrepreneurs because of it’s apparent pluriformity.

At the same time the average consumer or small business owner who has limited programming skills, marketing knowledge or market-access can adopt more new technologies more quickly and with less investment of time and money. A technology that is widespread and devaluated is harder to deliver a profit though so it’s probably a good idea for small business owners to help eachother make choices in this regard and find ways to save some time and effort by making effective use of aggregators when personally networking and in helping eachother making informed decisions about the (experimental) adoption of Social Media.

The HOB.Biz Can Help!

The HOB.Biz is both an experiment in social media adoption for business on the basis of limited programming skills and cost as well as an excellent platform for the exchange of information about it and a social media aggregator which helps save time and effort when networking oneself. The HOB.Biz: leveraging the power of Social Media for your Business!