According to the founder of Eudomanaic and Co. Umair Haque, the sustainability of any company depends upon its ability to create economic, social as well as emotional well-being amongst the consumers. If they lack this ability, the long-term success of these companies cannot be guaranteed.

Most social media, these days, lack this ability. The rise of these media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and the like are the best examples. These all attribute to the dopamine economy. That means to say they are less focused on creating value for their customers and more on exploiting their dopamine addiction to create economic benefits, say selling the customer-behavioral data to the businesses.

These have created the restless generation of addicts who can waste another 10 minutes without checking their smartphones. “Someone commented on your post”; click; “Someone Hearted your picture”; click; the trendy “Someone mentioned you in a comment”; click. And the sequence continues.   

The data published by Statista says that an average person spends about 135 minutes daily on social media. Despite this large chunk of time spent on media, the users also agree that this provides no significant value to the user. It's just photos and posts either uploaded by the others or by themselves seeking for some dopamine boost; nothing else of great value.

This goes on to say that since most of them lack the essential essence, the future of social media technology is likely to witness a great transformation in the coming few years.

“The dopamine economy is more likely to favor the social media which either keep coming up with the next new thing or holds something of greater value.”

Based on the long study of the popular social media, let’s attempt to predict what future these media will hold.

Facebook

In a presentation given by Scott Galloway, the professor of marketing at New York University, Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon are the four horsemen of the digital economy. He says that the major attractions of the social media are images and mobile. Facebook has both. It’s apps like Facebook and messenger have the easy-to-use interface which makes it popular with people of all ages.

On the other hand, the same simplicity has also pushed youngsters out of Facebook. Teenagers and youngsters are moving towards the media apps which make photo-sharing easier and cyber-safe. According to the data published by Statista, only about 7% of the young social media users like to use Facebook. Others render this social networking medium as ‘Not Cool.’  

Despite slowly losing its popularity amongst youngsters, it’s not that Facebook is staying still; the company itself owns the Occulus, Instagram, and Whatsapp and is working on the projects like AI, virtual reality, Facebook store, etc.  

Thus, Facebook, occupying about 61% of the social media users and 65 million Facebook business pages and still counting, it is unlikely to vanish out of the window for decades. With the newer technology it is planning to present to the public, Facebook, sure, is one of the four horsemen of the digital economy, as said by professor Scott Halloway.

Instagram

This is the most rapidly growing social media platform in the recent years. From the 600 million users as reported in December 2016, it rose to 100 million users coming to April 2017. Then, as in the year 2018, it has a whopping 800 million active users, magic, isn’t it?

With the rise in the use of photography expert smartphones, the platforms like these are the best ones to post the best of their photographs. Thus, about 95 million photos are uploaded each day, which cover 91.07% of all the Instagram posts according to a post by statusbrew.

With the social media giant, Facebook, taking Instagram under its wings, businesses can now use Instagram Business features to expand their business. Thus, it is expected to witness growth even more over the coming few years.  

Twitter

When we look at a data provided by Statista, compared to the exponential growth of about 270 million of Twitter users from 2010 to 2015, the number of Twitter users have gone on to become stagnant over the past few years nearly equal to about 330 million in 2017. Despite the fact that the value provided by Twitter to its users is highly significant in comparisons to the media like Facebook and Instagram, the revenue has not seen an appraisable growth these years. That said, recent statistics by Bloomberg say that the Twitter has a higher percentage of users who are highly educated and fall in the higher economic hierarchy. This is why in spite of the slowed growth, it has not failed to attract the businesses. After all, it is still the first medium where the news and live feeds come the fastest.

In a recent interview of the co-founder of Twitter Inc., Jack Dorsey said to the magazine Bloomberg that their primary focus has always been towards building a strong community of users and providing them good service rather than expanding towards newer users. He says that building a strong community of co-existing users will automatically bring on the newer faithful users. Thus, Twitter really seems to be a social media to provide true value to the users, which is, in fact, the best motive that will keep this company alive for years from now.

LinkedIn

As in the year 2017, LinkedIn users were counted to be about more than 530 million all over the world. Being a professional network, since its launch on May 5, 2003, it has witnessed a steady growth over years. It is widely becoming a tool for HR hiring, sales, and searching jobs.

Though it has witnessed a number of fluctuations in its value, its revenue has remained nearly constant. Thus, being a professional medium of one of its kind, it is likely to remain in the digital world for a pretty long time.        

Snapchat   

Built primarily keeping the cyber-crime in mind, Snapchat was built to store the messages, photos, and videos only for a short period of time. The contents, once viewed by the intended user, becomes inaccessible forever.

Launched in the year 2011, Snapchat has grown the number of its users to about daily 166 million active users as in May 2017, which mainly comprises of the teenage groups. With the features, such as augmented reality and 24 hr. chronological content, this has become a ‘Cool’ thing for the youngsters to use.

Thus, this platform has widely attracted the attention of the youngsters-targeted businesses where the entire platform is catered to optimize the experience for the youngsters. The businesses can create short 10s videos or announce their coupons and discounts over the Discover section.

So, despite the fact that it has a small reach of audience, it’s peculiar features shall keep it growing at a slow pace for a pretty long time-period.