We can imagine the future of social media through multiple lenses. Let’s take a look!

…Growth through Philanthropy…

Twitter’s mission statement reads, “To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Facebook’s mission statement reads, “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” LinkedIn’s mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. Quora’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge.

In all cases, the underlying theme is to connect people together to create an organism that is greater than the sum of its parts.

In the social media networks of the future, I see this amplified as companies seek to connect parts of the planet with limited access to social media and ease human suffering by fully utilizing the charitable power of their communities. Companies like Facebook could nucleate subsidiaries that will experiment with providing internet access or connected devices.

…Scale and User Experience…

In the days of LiveJournal, Xanga and Myspace, social media mainly existed as websites. Today, social media networks are no longer just sites. In fact, most people access social media from their mobile device than they do a desktop. Social media exists as a platform which can be accessed through apps, websites, and other platforms through APIs. Some social networks even exist as spidery advertising networks across the internet.

The social media networks of the future may be deviceless and scale infinitely. What does this mean? You could walk by a kiosk, a TV, a phone, your refrigerator, or any other device and – either through biometric scanning or RFID – the device will immediately bring up your favorite networks and preferences — no log in necessary.

…The Business of You…

From a marketing perspective, social media wishes to dominate the majority of your time on your connected devices so that they can:

  • learn about your behaviors and worldview, which in turn is bucketed into big data that could be offered to third parties, and
  • sell part of your attention to businesses who have decided to spend money to reach you on social media.

Companies that run social networks need to perform these activities in order to pay employees, cover operating costs, fund R&D, and stay profitable. In the future, I would anticipate social media sites would provide companies more opportunities including native chatbots, automation and predictive marketing while improving the end-user experience of advertising.

Bottom line?

Ultimately, these are just broad predictions based on the trajectory from where we’ve been to where we are today. Whether we’ll see this in the future – who knows? It’s certainly fun to think about. The only thing I can say with certainty is that social media – like television – is now an intimate part of us and our culture, and it’s here to stay as a major part of our experiences.

What do you think social media will be like in the future?