Social media trends in 2015 and the near future

Are you curious about the social media trends in 2015 or the near future?

Here I want to share a graph and an article with you.



I am interested in the following trends:

1. "Video is the next big thing in content marketing"

This predicted trend is helpful not only in marketing, but also in education. Appropriately importing videos in education, beyond instructors' playing videos, would be beneficial to both instructors and learners.

2. "Social media marketing improves search engine ranking"

That is, our activities and thoughts about one brand on social media will affect the brand's  appearing in search results. Then what about instructors, educational organizations? I think the effect of social media on instructors and educational organizations's rankings in search engine is also powerful.

3. "It is not going to be easy for new social media platforms"

It is normal for users to be tired to face so many similar social media tools and just adopt the most famous or recommended one without exploring differences among those similar tools. Therefore, to attract people's attention and gain success, people who want to design a new social media tool should pay attention to distinctive and neat functions.

How to protect your privacy when using social media

Everyone knows today that one will leave a footprint when clicking one link, posting, and commenting. Further, this footprint would be hard to completely deleted. This article warns us that rising use of social media also raises our risks of identity theft. And it also provides us with some suggestions to prevent from identity theft:

1. Be careful to enter sensitive info such as SSN, credit cards, and so on

This advise actually is useless, because most of time we cannot choose not to provide these kinds of information when shopping and opening a new account, for example. And it is not uncommon that companies such as Target was hacked and their customers were risk in identity theft.

2. Make strong password and change them often

Everyone knows this but rarely change password regularly.

3. Be careful what you click

People often realize just after clicking some viral links.

4. Do not overshare

The article give an funny example about sharing SSN with others. Who will do it? I think this should be changed to ask sharing websites to take much more responsibilities to protect users' sharing.

5. Check your privacy setting

Often it is hard for users to touch the privacy control in essence. Users should know which privacy is at risk and how in a simple and readable way.

6. Think before posting

What should I think? If think thoroughly and conservatively, no one will post anything.

Anyway, my point of view in this post is to ask government and social media company to take more responsibilities to protect users' privacy and thus make users feel safe and comfortable when enjoining social media, rather than persuading users to keep far away from social media and provide unpractical advises.

Ponder over Snapchat

Snapchat is a video messaging application with the function that senders can set a time limit (one to 10 seconds) on how long recipients can view the snaps. I really have no idea why Snapchat became popular in America relying on this one unusual function.

1. Why do people need to set a time limit now that they decide to post the snaps?

I get answers for this question explained by people sending sexting, cheating in tests, and other negative purposes. In a positive way, what are people's purposes on using this function?

2. Can people really hide snaps after the set time?

People can use screenshots, even if Snapchat claims that they will let senders know if recipients take screenshots of their snaps. Moreover, there are many apps to display unopened snaps, such as SnapSpy. More importantly, those hidden snaps are not completely deleted from Snapchat's servers.

3. Why the similar apps with Snapchat are not popluar at all in China?

After Snapchat being popular in America, many similar apps appear and even QQ develop a similar function. But all of them fail to attract Chinese people's interest. Someone says it is because Chinese people prefer chatting to social networks, but Americans are the opposite. Other people think that it is because Chinese people want to keep positive facing their relatives and friends while Americans like to showcase their different sides from their regular life to surprise their friends.

What do you think about them?

Ponder over Yik Yak

It is not uncommon that one day you wake up and then find one word, idea, or app fill up all your world. It attract public's attention and catch on so fast and so widely. Yik Yak is one of them, although I just knew it today from the discussion board of the course. I search it to figure out why Yik Yak is so popular among college students.

1. Yik Yak allows users to anonymously microblog.

This reminds me of the anonymous board on university BBS in China. In China many university has at least one BBS, and on the BBS the anonymous board is always one of the most popular boards. Students and even faculty would speak out freely and find people's most authentic thoughts on the anonymous board.

2. Users of Yik Yak inside the certain radius can post and read other people's “yaks”, and "peek" other Yik Yak community feeds.

I personally have a habit- searching film reviews after watching a film, because I have some thoughts about the film and want to see if others have the same thoughts with me. This kind of curious is not limited to the film. For example, my housing community recently decides to paint some parts (the other parts keep the old gray color) of walls in orange, and I want to complain about it because the part orange makes the apartments weird and ugly. This thing is so small to google. But using Yik Yak might help me find people nearby comment on the same thing.

Yik Yak's main audiences are limited to college students and is also criticized for cyber-bullying. Anyway, it's easy to open a shop but hard to keep it always open. Let's see what will happen to Yik Yak in the future.