Why Social Media is Socially Inadequate
Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn were designed for the purpose of reaching a lot of people quickly. Creating an account on a social media site grants you access to a supposed large network of friends, acquaintances and strangers to connect with. In fact, if there is nobody on the network at all, the social media site fails. Its job is to cultivate a breadth of relationships. Social media sites are meant to connect you to a wide range of people, and this has worked very well over the last decade.
However, we have seen this mindset start to change over time. New social media sites no longer have the appeal that they had ten years ago. Each new site that is introduced promises to create relationship breadth in a new way. But this isn’t necessary — an MIT study from this year found we have more social media relationships than we can physically handle. Even existing social media sites feel cluttered, and they are seemingly competing over meaningless customer pain points. Social media sites have over-solved the problem they set out to solve. What they didn’t anticipate was that as more and more people joined social media, human culture would undergo a shift. Snapchat jumped on this early, for example, offering private and more personalized interaction with your contacts.
The resulting depreciating returns on social media can be simply described as follows: each new person that joins social media creates less value than the previous person to join the network. Moreover, each new social media site that a person uses subtracts value from their existing sites. In everyday language, this effect is referred to as social media overload.
Today, we desire more than just being connected to a wide range of people. We desire connections with depth in order to find real value out of the clutter that is social media. Smarter social media sites have attempted to address this using AI. Facebook’s content relevancy algorithms promise to show you content from the people that you care about. LinkedIn Connections in the News sends you an email if any of your connections gets some press written about them. These are amazing starts to the real problems of the social media user, but there is a more urgent problem that hasn’t completely been solved.
In order to generate more meaningful relationships, a shift away from news feeds are needed. Fireflies is tackling this problem by becoming a personal relationship manager that reminds you to reach out to important contacts. It uses AI to figure out when the best time to reach out is, and what exactly to send them to spark a great conversation. As social media is to breadth, Fireflies is to depth. We sincerely believe that a fundamental change is needed to solve the cluttering problems brought about by social media overload. Today, we are providing recommendations to help manage your busy life. Tomorrow, we will be the agent that helps you become socially successful.
Sam is a senior at MIT. He’s a co-founder of Fireflies and he’s excited about the future of AI in applications like messaging platforms and unmanned aerial vehicles.
