Fleeting trends

 

With social media companies all seeming to blend into one nowadays, it’s interesting to note the companies who know things aren’t working and can pull the plug before any more time and resources are spent on them… Yes, we are talking about you @Twitter.

 

Now, this is no disrespect to Twitter as they were trying to jump on the bandwagon of creating ‘stories’ like features for their users, made famous by Facebook & Instagram… who ‘borrowed’ this feature from Snapchat… I think you can sense a pattern here. A lot of the time, with social media, it seems to be an initial race on who can create the next best new feature and a subsequent race on who can replicate that and capitalise on it.

 

With Instagram now coming out and saying they are no longer a photo-sharing app, currently focusing on becoming a clone of Tik Tok, it begs the question, is this what users want? I believe the eagerness to copy other platforms and become a one-stop hub for all things social media leads to a decline in competition and a lack of innovation.

 

No one wants to see Instagram become  Tik Tok. They don’t want to have to choose between two apps that would, in broad terms, do the same thing. Personally speaking, I would much prefer social media networks to hone in on what makes their platform unique and develop new and exciting features that would entice users.

 

The major problem is that users want to see features such as ‘stories’ on their platform of choice as they want the ability to share information just as they can do elsewhere. Now, this doesn’t always work, like how we opened on Twitter pulling the plug of Fleets, but that’s ok as they are still a platform that remains unique compared to their main competitor Facebook.

 

The problem lies where platforms are too quick to jump on to trends and becomes flawed iterations of what already exists.

 

#RipFleets

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