Social Networks, what's next after mobile?

Social networks have been part of our lives for nearly the past 10 years now. Do you remember what it was like at the beginning ? No one expected that they’ll be so important in our daily life.

It basically started in 2004-2006 when we started to use social networks before they quickly evolved with new functionalities between 2008 and 2010 and started their monetization with advertising.

Gradually, other behaviors started to emerge in the society with the development of smartphones. Noticing this new way to browse the internet, social networks adapted their offer to what we call “mobile first” as more and more users were accessing these websites from a mobile device.

And now ? Basically all the social networks are now on the same level with a platform that works perfectly and is appreciated by users. They offer a range of functionalities and started to implement advertising on their service (for Pinterest and Instagram this move is quite recent).

What they have to do now, as they did in the past with mobile, is to adapt to our needs and our way of life. If you take the example of Twitter, the big innovations were not made by the teams around the world but by users themselves. ReTweets, hashtags, mentions and connected applications were created by users. Twitter adapted them and made them easier to use.

The market is now saturated for the biggest social networks. Their growth is not increasing as quickly as it used to and the only way for them to get back in the golden age is to change to adapt the users’ needs.

So what’s next ? Well, you might already use some and they are at full throttle : connected objects.

According to different sources more than 30 billion devices will wirelessly connected to the internet in 2020. This involves social networks obviously. It can be watches, glasses, cars, houses, shoes… Everything will be connected and will propose new functionalities (pretty exciting isn’t it).

So what about social networks ? Google announced its collection of connected objects called Android Wear and they’ll make your life easier. You’ll keep in touch with your friends from your watches, they’ll remind you and guide you to this event you replied “attending” to…

Social networks have to adapt themselves the quickest possible way to match our needs and envy. What they’ll keep in mind is how to adapt the objects to make them social and the other way round. By knowing the different use of social media, connected objects will make them even more available and better to use.

Without any doubt, connected objects are the next big thing and are about to get into our daily life (or already did, if you’re an early adopter).