What's New in Social Media August, 2015

It's Sunday, so this article may read more like a blog entry than usual. 

What’s new in social media in August, 2015? Digital marketing changes at such a fast pace, let’s try to make some observations shall we?

Did you know, that Pinterest has an estimated 250 million unique monthly visitors, right behind LinkedIn? As much as career minded individuals think LinkedIn may be useful, women ecommerce shoppers (reputed to be 80% female) like social media more! 

While Facebook has triple the unique monthly visitors, we have to assume actual activity on the network is down as more competitors arrive on the scene. We know that youtube remains the #2 search engine in the world, and the way Facebook counts video views (3 seconds on auto-play!?!) is highly suspect way of inflating their video traffic reports.

While advertisers apparently pay 100 million a year on the platform, you have to wonder if most of the ads just get buried in the amount of inane content on the channel.  Maybe when social ecommerce is fully implemented and live-streaming for journalists goes live, it will be more interesting again.

Did you know, that despite all the hype Instagram has, Tumblr still has more unique monthly visitors? This is indeed hard to believe, but it may be due to the fact of how adaptable Tumblr is, it can do a lot more and its micro-blogging features have an interesting reach among younger Millennials. The glitz and glamour of Instagram is great for all those extended #hashtags, but it’s so skewed to visual content and micro videos, it’s definitely cool ‘dumbed-down’ content. Instagram is fun for visual story-telling and social proof that clicks are in the faces (selfies abound here). In the digital marketing peer field, Instagram is known for quotes and tips mostly. While Tumblr is said to have 217 million blogs created with 420 million total users.

Youtube is expected to generate $5.6 billion in gross revenue in 2016. There is currently 6 billion hours of video watched per month and 1 billion hours of videos watched of over mobile phones per day. Don’t forget Reddit (174 unique million monthly visitors) in social media, peer sharing is one of the trends in online education these days (I prefer Quora).

Alphabet announced Google + will no longer be forced (a requirement) to access Google Services. This gives Youtube users a break, as the customer experience for them to simply create a channel was not good. Google + is mostly used as a SEO link tool by digital marketers and is not really a seriously platform with a reputation for a bad interface with spamming low-engagement content.

Since Instagram plugs into Hootsuite & brought it’s search functionality to desktop, it changes a lot of things. It makes it more accessible and those pesky selfies and sometimes experimental videos more accessible. This is a good and bad thing. Bad if you haven't been taking Instagram seriously.

Snapchat continues to refine it’s platform and interface and remains someone to watch. It’s one of the veritable Gen Z channels for SMS.  Twitter announced earlier this year that Google would once again index tweets in real-time. Apparently 96% of all tweets haven’t even been indexed. Relationships between these companies are so “off and on again” that following their interrelations is like a gossip column.

For more news and happenings in August in Social Media click here. Have a good Sunday everyone, 

Michael Spencer writes articles on Digital marketing, social media, futurism and start-up companies daily here.