Shortly after the smartphone boom between 2008-2014, tech trends shifted, and the priority of desktop users switched to mobile users. This switch in focus caused a new wave of creating features that take advantage of the mobile phone’s abilities, allowing for the ease and convenience of smart phones to transfer to their respective apps. Exploring just a few of the more popular social media platforms, we can analyze their development versatility, and conclude what exactly has made them successful.
With 1.79 billion users and counting, Facebook is the current social media giant. Of those 1.79 billion, 1 billion of those users are now mobile-only. Facebook’s success in mobile networking can be found in its focus on these growing mobile users, starting with the creation and improvement of their then existing iOS and Android applications, and also their implementation of Facebook Zero and Facebook SIM. Facebook Zero was launched in 2010 as a lite version of the desktop layout of Facebook, condensed into a text-only, no-photos-included format. The next year, Facebook launched Facebook SIM, which allowed phones without data plans to receive SMS text messages of Facebook updates, allowing many people without smart phone devices to connect to Facebook on the go. Shortly after the release of Facebook SIM, the amount of mobile users began to outnumber the desktop users. The social media juggernaut has cemented itself as the leading social media network by first making it easily-accessible, and mobile-friendly. Facebook predicted that smartphones would be the new norm back before basic cellular devices reigned supreme, and by becoming a mobile-first company, their bets have paid off, resulting in overall more total users.
Instagram, another app owned by Facebook started with Kevin Systrom’s (CEO) idea to create an app with a focus on making photography fast and easy on a mobile platform. Smartphones made taking photos easier than ever, but there was no good medium in which to share them. Facebook and Flickr were also photo-sharing websites, but the process of uploading photos was too time-consuming. Instagram’s audiences responded well to a stripped-down, minimalistic photo app, and Instagram reached a million users in under two months after its launch in October, 2010. Instagram’s success is undeniable proof that sometimes less is more, especially on a mobile platform. Before becoming a finished product, Instagram was built with a plethora of other features, such as check-ins, but Systrom and co-founder Mike Krieger felt it was too cluttered and removed absolutely everything besides photos, likes, and comments. The result is a great app that does everything as expected, nothing less and nothing more.
One of the general rules of product design is to make your product intuitive, but Snapchat has largely avoided making their product intuitive and has instead opted to create a product that is instead developed with shareable design. As history has shown, the trend-setters are the younger generations; the generations after generation X decide what is currently hip. Snapchat’s largest age demographic are users aged 18-24, making up a hefty 37% of current Snapchat users. The amount of younger users dominate the the amount of older users, with only about 2% of users at over the age of 55. The reason for this large age gap is in Snapchat’s design. Snapchat is not easily-learned. Its features are hidden and not easily found, making a perfect app for younger people to have an exclusive platform away from older generations (Over the past three years, the proportion of teenagers on Facebook has decreased by 25.3%, while users aged 55+ yrs have increased by 80.4%). Furthermore, its unintuitive features make Snapchat a great alternative for mass-sharing platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. While these other media platforms encourage making one’s self-image picture perfect, Snapchat differs in that it focuses on simply capturing the moment at hand. Instagram is meant for quick, clean photos, while Snapchat is meant for capturing absolutely anything with ease. No matter how you close the app, it will open again on the mobile camera, allowing you to swiftly pull out your phone and reply to a humorous selfie from a friend with another one, or record something odd happening before it’s over.
The distinctive features that each of the aforementioned applications have are what make them successful in their own rites, but all can be credited with either the normalization of smart devices, or the focus on utilizing these smart devices. There is a direct correlation with the increase in social media usage and the increase of people who own smartphones. From this, we can conclude that the social media is currently reigned by mobile users, and the number of mobile users on these apps is surely to grow, as long as these media companies keep doing what they have found to be successful. What we may see next is either a regression back to desktop users, or further growth in the mobile market.
Keep this information in mind when designing your next application or platform.
