In the last ten years, our lives have changed dramatically. Before social media became a big part of our lives, many of us were fine with keeping our privacy and not sharing much about our social lives. When MySpace began to dominate the internet, people felt compelled to share photos, stories, and thoughts from their personal experiences. Since then, everything has shifted. Blogging, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have taken over our cameras, computers, phones, and tablets.
Social media has become a great place to find new websites and content like the Pixar Theory, make new friends, and it’s great for businesses too. After social media finished it’s invasion into our personal lives, it quickly became a staple in everyone’s Internet diet.
But what has happened after the barrage of social media ended?
Technology is constantly evolving around us. The old brick phones evolved into flip phones, and eventually into today’s smartphones. For those who preferred not to carry a computer or smartphone, we developed tablets. Laptops now come with touch screens, and software updates are typically just ahead for all our devices. If our technology is always changing, shouldn’t our social media adapt to keep pace?
We all get on these sites. Some of us use them more than others, but most of us will use social media on a daily basis. We are constantly sharing the changes in our lives and staying connected via status updates and pictures, but it hasn’t made any significant changes in a long time.
If we think about Facebook, the last major updates made were the chat features, video chat, and the timeline in the top right corner of your screen that says what your friends are doing. Twitter’s last major updates better displayed a conversation thread, which lessens the clicking necessary to better follow your timeline. With those two exceptions, social media hasn’t kept up with our ever changing lives.
On the other hand, businesses it seems are finally catching on to the social media potential when it comes to connecting to customers and honing in on the target market. Sites like Yelp allow people to deliver direct feedback to companies in a convenient, timely manner. Social media has a lot of reach and a lot of potential, but where is the continual innovation and progress? Social media hasn’t experienced a huge jump in users recently. Part of this is because they aren’t presenting new content and features to attract those who aren’t using social media. If they can produce something new, they can potentially lure some new users and demographics to create an account on their websites.
One of the reasons behind this lack of change and updates to their sites might come from fear. Why fix what isn’t broken? Many companies that have updated their sites and software have faced a lot of criticism from their users, and they’ve encountered a lot of problems. Social media is usually one of the first stops for anybody who logs into the internet. If they’re drawing in so many loyal, unique visitors, why should they change?
Facebook, Google Plus, and other social media websites have tried to make changes in the past. After they’ve made these changes, they’ve received mostly complaints from their users. If social media does change, and its users only complain about the changes, why would you actually want to change? If your users are happy with the product, why would you want to stir the pot and mix things up? Any normal company wouldn’t do such a thing.
There is one thing, however, that we can all agree on: social media is at a complete standstill. The public isn’t quite aware of the reasoning behind the quagmire that is social media, but whatever it is, it seems like it’s not going to change anytime soon. With social media as one of the most common sources for receiving news, connect with friend and create your network, there is a very small chance that the social media sites that you use will but updated. Get used to it.