16 SKILLS FOR 21 ST CENTURY

SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE

FUTURE
Chirag K
CMO of Medly
11 WAYS SOC.MED WILL EVOLVE IN THE FUTURE
• A focus on relationships
• Diversity of personal posts
• Users will pay for peace
• Different types of groups
• Increased focus on privacy
• Less gamification
• Legacy building
• Open to experimentation
• Mobile-native
• Build us up, don’t tear us down
• Video, video, and more video
Focus on Relationship
• “Social platforms today have evolved into a broadcast tool both for
companies and individuals,”.
• “While this is valuable when you have a broad announcement to
share and want to reach as many people as possible, these are no
longer the vehicles for sharing photos of your kids, recording audio or
staying connected with your inner circle of family and friends.”

• To fix this, social media will probably begin to draw the focus back
into relationships by emphasizing personal posts, photographs and
small, intimate connections over outside content like memes and
articles.
Diversity of Personal Posts
• Until now, posts have been limited to outside material, pictures,
videos and text.
• Don’t be surprised if, going forward, new players will introduce more
diverse posting options, intermingling audio and visual components
to create a unique experience for people viewing and creating posts.
As digital technology progresses, people will be hungry for new and
interesting ways to share experience.
• The importance audio will play in social media’s future: “Just as many
of us gathered around a cassette recorder in our early childhood, the
unique power of audio can be experienced once again using our
smartphones.”
Users Will Pay for Peace
• Premium service will make a splash.
• This one sounds counterintuitive -- after all, who would pay for a
social media experience when they’ve all been free up to this point.
• Two things will happen to change that previous wisdom.
• First, with a more personal, story-driven experience, customers will want
high-quality images, videos and audio files stored for posterity.
• Second, having a place to escape constant advertisements will become very
important, something a premium social media experience will offer.
• “In order to ensure our digital memories are stored and preserved
there should be a direct and clear relationship between
compensation and the service provided.”
Different Types of Groups
• Google Plus tried something like this before to little success, but spurred by
the frustration caused by people seeing the wrong posts, social grouping
will make a comeback.
• In the last political cycle, many relationships were tested unnecessarily
when people felt attacked by never-ending political rants. If you don’t want
Grandma to see your stances on gay marriage, put her in your non-political
group. This will become very important for relationship maintenance.
• “Context is everything,”
• “The person we are with our family is not necessarily the person we are
with our college friends. Nevertheless, there’s a desire to stay connected
with all of these groups but in a separate forum.”
Increased Focus on Privacy
• Privacy concerns have plagued social media since its inception, and
are only getting more pronounced.
• Expect future social media companies to offer more advanced
network and profile privacy than ever before.
Less Gamification
• One of social media’s key components is that it’s highly addictive,
even going so far as to be described as more addictive than cigarettes.
• New platforms will try to gear more toward long-term customer
wellness as a feature by staving off more addictive qualities. They will
focus more on the communal quality of social media rather than offer
quick hits of serotonin from gratifying and frustrating outside content.
Legacy Building
• As has been said many times, the internet is written in ink.
• It cannot be erased, and in the future, people won’t want it to be. Users
will want their social media to existing as an ongoing time capsule, a living
record of their lives.
• Smart platform builders will realize posting shouldn't be a burst about a
single moment in time, to be consumed in a few seconds and forgotten
about immediately, but as a multi-faceted, interactive diary involving many
writers, all telling pieces of their own and others’ stories.
• “We’ve arrived at a place where we are as thoughtful about capturing a
personal moment to preserve as we are about carefully curating our
Instagram feed,”
• “It’s a question of the legacy you want to leave behind. If someone has 2
hours to flip through your life’s journey, what do you want them to see?”
Open to Experimentation
• The main social media giants are slow, lumbering machines, resistant
to change, and unbearably clumsy when they do change.
• Future models will have seen platforms of the past try different things
to different levels of success and will be open to explore. They will try
out wildly different ways of managing contacts, befriending people,
organizing interface layouts, etc.
• Facebook has had basically the same layout since its beginning --
don’t expect that to be the case with new platforms.
Mobile-Native
• A mammoth advantage new platforms will have is that they about
after the smartphone became ubiquitous. Facebook and Twitter both
came before they could really function on a mobile phone, but future
platforms will be designed with phones in mind from the beginning.
• No clumsy borrowing between web and phone platforms -- seamless
integration. The future of the internet is mobile, so it stands to reason
that mobile-native platforms will be built to last.
Build Us Up, Don’t Tear Us Down
• The self care and heartfulness movements are big right now for a
reason. In a world as chaotic and terrifying as ours, with such a
constant barrage of information and stimuli, personal well-being is a
thing we must actively pursue and maintain.
• Family and friend communities have been part of humanity since
there was humanity, and they’re there to build us up. Social media
will begin to recognize that again.
Video, Video, and More Video
• In late 2016, we saw a major development in social media video when
Instagram release Instagram Stories and Instagram Live. Instagram's
parent company Facebook also released Facebook Live and
Messenger Day. The focus on the live format follows in the footsteps
of Snapchat and Twitter's Periscope.
• According to Jay Singh, CEO of PHL Venture Company,
• “We continue to see a shift toward live content that is composed through a
camera. The camera keeps growing in importance and the ability to see
through other people's lenses in real time is becoming a powerful force in
social media."
Conclusion
• The most recent cycle has exposed a lot of what was rotten in social
media, making us all so constantly aware of what is wrong with
ourselves and others that we barely have space in our heads for
anything other than frustration and anxiety.
• If they’re smart, new social media platforms will understand that
create a new kind of social networking -- a kind that actually feels like
a personal asset instead of a detriment.
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 4.0
UNICORN