Four Social Media Predictions For 2020
Pictured: Me trying to explain TikTok to my family over the holidays.
Hi, welcome back for 2020. It's been a while but I thought we'd continue on from 'The Year In Social Media' and have a quick look at four Social Media predictions for 2020.
One To Watch: Discord
Ok, totally setting myself up for failure here but my prediction for 2020 social will see Discord, a VoIP service used primarily for gaming, branch out into the Social Media sphere. Any regular Discord user will probably eat me alive for labelling the service Social Media but, I promise, there is some precedent to my madness.
Discord, (kinda like Reddit) has always been community-centric with gaming, fanbase and geographic communities representing the majority of the service. However, there has been a steady increase in non-gaming related communities, with examples including Kpop, fantasy football, meme and university communities (NSFW).
It really depends on where Discord decides to take the service but if they continue to open up to non-gaming communities (as they have been), we'll for sure start to see brands on there by the end of 2020.
TikTok'l Be Sweatin'
2019 was a crazy year for TikTok, with the platform both blowing up (around August) and slugging through its share of privacy, data and foreign influence scandals.
I frankly don't have a massive amount of faith TikTok will make it all the way through 2020 unscathed with an onslaught of clones set to land in 2020 as well as rumours TikTok could be looking, or forced to sell (good read) in light of the regulatory nightmare they've run into with the United States.
Of course, with or without these growing pains TikTok will have enormous growth over 2020 it'll just be a matter of whether or not the Social Media industry is ready to let them get away with it.
Twitter Set To Lock Down Privacy
So, we spoke about this a bit last year but heading into 2020 it looks like Twitter is going to be grounding itself as privacy-friendly (not centric yet) platform for people looking to get away from the shadiness of FB (and co). From recent announcements of reply control, boycotting of political ads and 'disinterest' to not adding an edit tweet option (a good thing IMO).
These are in addition to last years launch of the centralised 'Privacy Centre' and other user protection features. There is a long way to go before we can genuinely say Twitter is privacy-centric with 2019 closing out with news that a bug allowed 17 million mobile numbers to be matched to user accounts. Even with these privacy failures, my guess is without some serious commitment to privacy Twitter could start losing some of its market to privacy-centric, but little known competitor 'Mastodon' (add this to your 'ones to watch list').
The Year Of Insta Ads
Instagram has had a HUGE run of growth since it first kicked off in 2010, like seriously, it has been a non-stop run for the Facebook-owned platform. However, 2020 is set to be the year that Instagrams growth will level off which honestly doesn't seem like a massive deal unless of course, you're an Insta/Facebook exec looking to up last years revenue.
Without its historical growth, it's almost certain 2020 will be a year of ad saturation for Instagram (and it's users). Rumours of more insta-shop features, interactive story ads and more are all pointing to the likely onslaught of ads destined for the app across the year. We'll have to see what unfolds, but with TikTok putting the pressure on all Facebook's properties we're bound to see more and more paid media options out there.