It's the time of year to look back on what happened in 2013 in the world of social media, and it was a pretty odd year. Sure, there were scandals galore, and the world of social media played a big part in the Snowden affair, but it's time to take a hard look at what to drop from 2013.
The first thing is Snapchat. This tech startup has had $73 million poured into it, yet it can't seem to make any money. In fact, it has virtually no independent earning capacity because it deletes the data that its users send within a few seconds. This is great for sending risqué photos of yourself, but it's not so good for monetization. The company rejected a $3 billion offer from Facebook and chose to go it alone, so it's hard to see how investors will get their money back. If it had paired up with Facebook, the data it held could've been married up with Facebook's user data, enabling advertisers to send instant targeted ads to Snapchat users. Added to that the massive data breaches and the inability to mend them, along with the pending litigation involving the company's founders, and it seems this 2013 fad is on its way out—unless it gets bought out, of course.
Hopefully, selfies are another passing trend on its way out, although it seems likely that they'll continue well into 2014. While people have always done selfies—at least since they've been able to hold a camera comfortably in one hand—this pictorial phenomenon really took off in 2014. It's great for advertising and marketing professionals because if you can get a lot of people to tweet or Instagram your product, you've got a cheap advertising platform. Unfortunately, it seems that there's now a selfie backlash, so they should gradually tail off as people drop them in favor of the next social media trend.
Social media games may be the final fad of 2013 to drop. Games that occur wholly on Facebook are no longer particularly well liked, particularly by those who mark such things as spam. They're a good money spinner, but it seems that the market for social media games has been tapped out. The real money is in the app market at the moment, and with Apple having made $10 billion from its App Store in 2013, there's evidently a huge market out there.
While cat memes and the like are still guaranteed to draw a smile, and selfies are still creating media buzz, the various 2013 fads seem destined to fade away. Of course, social media is a resilient idea—and its trends are very unpredictable—so who knows what will happen in 2014?
(Photo courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net)
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