Tag: social networking

Youth begin to flee from Facebook

The youth of the world are beginning to favor simple messaging applications for their mobile devices over Facebook. These applications allow consumers to create personal profiles, build networks of friends and other contacts, share digital content, such as video, music, and pictures. While these applications provide many of the same services that made Facebook popular several years ago, these applications have one thing that Facebook does not have: They are not Facebook.

Consumers beginning to favor simple messaging apps for their mobile devices

Young, tech-savvy consumers through North America, Asia, and Europe are beginning to flock to these messaging applications in order to connect with one another. Many of these applications, such as Kik and Whatsapp, both of which are very popular in North America, combine text messaging with social networking, allowing users to connect with one another quickly without relying on messaging plans offered by wireless network operators or the sometimes stifling design of social networking platforms.

Apps could provide better services than Facebook

These apps have an appeal to consumers based on the fact that they are designed around the concept of communication. Google Ventures partner Rich Miner suggests that the majority of interactions that people have with one another come in the form of text messages and phone calls. Many people do not involve themselves in social networks simply for the purpose of communication. Consumers are beginning to find that simple messaging applications can suffice their need to communicate with others. These applications can also effectively share digital content, removing yet another reason for consumers to rely on social networking platforms.

Facebook remains the champion of social networking

Facebook boasts of more than 1 billion users worldwide, thus solidifying it as the most popular and widely used social networking platform in the world. The company recently began embracing the mobile space more aggressively, producing the most used smartphone application on the market today. Nonetheless, consumers are still flocking to messaging applications that offer the same services as Facebook but without any association to the sometimes controversial social network.

Adding this increasingly popular network to online and mobile efforts can make a considerable difference.

As Google+ continues its climb up the ranks of social media marketing networks, a growing number of experts in the industry are beginning to call it essential instead of simply appealing as a part of an overall strategy.

The platform currently sits in the second most popular spot, having recently surpassed Twitter.

For social media marketing companies, this represents an important potential shift toward Google+, where it had not previously been seen as vital as a part of a campaign or strategy. The fact that the platform currently boasts over 343 million active users simply cannot be overlooked any longer.

Though older social media marketing strategies may still be holding out, it is only a matter of time.

According to Daily Deal Media junior editor, Megan Bildner, the majority of businesses still think of Google+ as “irreverent” when it comes to social media marketing to consumers. She went on to say that instead of focusing their attentions on the network, they have been looking to other popular options such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, which have been in existence for a longer period of time.

However, Bildner also went on to write that though this could still be working at the moment, the rapid rise of Google+ is changing the social media marketing environment and businesses need to start paying attention to the new reality. Bildner says that there is a powerful reason that Google+ has been able to achieve the rapid successes that it has seen, and that is that their number of active users is rapidly on the rise.

She also pointed out that through that network, “business content ranks higher when posted on Google+, they have a different approach to marketing and Google’s future will change how integrate all the necessary apps in our life.” From a social media marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) standpoint, that represents critically important issues to any business that hopes to succeed online and over mobile.

Social media marketing companies are increasingly making the connection that this network must be a part of their mix, and that failing to do so could potentially leave them falling behind the competition.