Where Is Social Media Headed?

Our children are our future—I don’t remember who sang or said that phrase first but I think we all agree on the notion that today’s kids are the ones who will be in decision making roles, future consumers, and our leaders in the years to come.

The biggest story of starting with the kids, of course, is the Facebook story. A college kid created a platform for just college kids. It took hold, ramped up, rolled out to a few select colleges—then eventually all colleges. You could only join if you had an .edu email address.

Then as kids graduated and lost their .edu accounts but wanted to stay in touch and online, Facebook eventually opened up to the world—the rest, of course, is known to all.

So where are the college kids today? Many have abandoned Facebook and are migrating to Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram—and while I don’t have access to marketing research, this is what I am witnessing.

While business owners and marketing professionals watch the numbers of people joining platforms, what we need to also be keeping an eye on is also who is leaving and where they are going. A closer watch on which demographics are jumping in and which ones are bailing out.

©iStockphoto.com/pearleye

Today is today and tomorrow is going to be another story all together. I am not a futurist but I am a realist. I know that my clients must today be on the bigger social platforms in order to sustain their viability, but where should I be leading them for tomorrow?

If anyone knows of any industry research on this topic and can share, please do as I think that it is going to be a hot topic in 2013 to 2014, as I think that 2016 will be a totally different landscape than 2012.

Like large bodies of water finding its way into estuaries, with little to no overlap, I believe social media in time will move more toward this model. It is too noisy, too crowded, too salesy, too messy, too fragmented to manage or comprehend, and I suspect that the shift will be to smaller more controlled digital applications and communities.

Where do you think social media is going?