3 Ways Social Media Platforms Fail

Here are three primary reasons why some social media platforms have failed in my opinion

LAW 1. The goal or the primary role of most social media platforms is to entertain the viewers and make new celebrities of the creators from the viewpoint of the general users.
Any social media platform that fails in these primary objectives is already in its final days.

When was the last time you heard someone new became famous on Facebook?
How many people were able to kick start their influencer career on Facebook, relative to platforms like YouTube, and Instagram in its early days and now TikTok.

It's highly paramount for social media platform creators to note this.

For instance, you can simply do a google search of the sentence “ Facebook famous people “ “ Youtube famous people “ “ tiktok famous people “& “ Instagram famous people ” and below is a screenshot of what the result will be for each platform:

As you can see both YouTube and TikTok display individuals that were primary contributors on their platforms, and without their social media platforms these creators might never have been discovered.

While all results show actual personalities or celebrities, it's only facebook that shows random results because Facebook is failing to help new content creators grow easily and reach a wider audience relatively easier than these other social media platforms for free.

LAW 2. Too many decisions spoil the experience.
Avoid a complex UI/UX: the more decisions required to be made the less interested the average user will be willing to learn to navigate, and the more menus and drop-downs required to efficiently navigate a social media platform the harder it becomes for it to retain its audience.

Every tool created to engage with its users has to have as few buttons as possible. Nobody wants all the features in the world in one app at once and even though you possess such an app if you effectively obey law 1, it should be rolled out a feature at a time and not launched all at once.

LAW 3: Users must have an avenue within the platform to make money from their content and/or their followers directly.

Even though each platform is different they are still similar in many ways. The primary source of income for these platforms and their creators is through paid advertisements and eCommerce. So they have the same task for figuring the next set of influencers for the next generation, failing to do so would lead to people leaving their platforms as they don’t see any path to growth on that platform.