Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat… In 10 Years Who’s Still Standing?
No one wants to read your millennial musings on Twitter anymore. Instagram just makes you hungry now. Your ugly faces on Snapchat will get old after awhile…
Novelty. Fads. Shrinking attention spans.
When even Facebook is being abandoned how can these companies keep millennials coming?
They can’t.
At least… not as they are now.
When Amazon was first starting in 1994 out of a Bellevue garage, it was a humble online bookstore business. Today — 22 years later — it’s the largest internet-based retailer in the world. How?
The secret sauce was in Bezos’ business plan. He chose to defer profitability by four years. His plan completely hinged on growth. When the dot-com bubble burst, Amazon survived, and not only did it survive… it grew and grew and grew. Why? Because they didn’t stunt their growth to remain a bookstore business.
When you put it like that it sounds like common sense, but it’s a little deeper than that… because they could have kept trucking along slowly taking over the publishing industry and we don’t know where they would be now if they did. But we do know that they wouldn’t have grown nearly as much. The point is they took a huge risk to shift their business model so dramatically but it paid off… and the cost for not having taken that risk could have, in fact, been their downfall.
This is the risk I believe Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter must take if they want to survive the test of time. Because the problem these guys have in common is that what caused them to get so big is exactly what stunts their growth now — the gimmick of their platform.
Twitter’s schtick is you get 140 characters to say your piece… Snapchat you get a few seconds and one chance to view… Instagram you get a 1080 x 1080px square…
There is only so much within these constraints that allow for fresh original content… and when the content is structured for such fast consumption the novelty of these constraints expires even faster.
To a degree, they are aware of this… Snapchat has been exploring micro-transactions and adding new dimensions for content generation like stickers and filters. Instagram added new filters, allowed for panoramas, and added vine-style videos… and Twitter… Twitter is just trying to attract new users.
While these efforts help buy time, they treat the symptom, not the disease. These companies are simply not poised for growth in the long term. The key then to answering the question “who will still stand 10 years from now?” is to decide who can adapt the best and grow with the times… this is exactly survival of the fittest.
Of course, that’s not to say this is a zero sum game… one of them doesn’t have to lose for the others to win but it is to say that of the three that survive they will have changed and adapted to the times and they won’t nearly be what they are now.
Let’s start with Snapchat…
At 5 years old it’s the youngest and most speculative of the three. It’s also seemingly the most gimmicky… “Why would you care about sending a picture that lasts a few seconds? You can send pictures that last FOREVER on Facebook messenger…”
It also remains relevant until a certain age… you’re not gonna be “snappin” your friends when your 60. That means Snapchat needs to attract each new generation as time cycles through. This can also be an advantage because it means it just needs to be relevant to a user for a cycle of use.
All things considered, I think Snapchat will be around in 10 years but it’ll be floundering… in 20 years I think it will be gone.
Twitter is a different story. It’s the oldest at 9 years and counting, and it’s at its lowest. Growth is stunted and the product isn’t evolving. The question for Twitter is where we do we go from here? The character count is a winning constraint so changing that would be heresy. But how else can Twitter grow and be more accessible to the rest of the world? It has to either offer something more than a microblogging platform or make that platform useful for a wider demographic.
My Verdict
My intuition, however, is that as a brand Twitter is strong and will make a comeback within 10 years.
Finally Instagram. This one is dead easy… Instagram is here to stay.
Why? Because Instagram isn’t just a social media app… it’s a utility with social features. It allows users to become photographers without the practice it would require to learn the skills. Instagram will last for the same reason other image-sharing platforms like Flickr and Photobucket do and it will thrive for the reason social media apps like Facebook do.
That’s it. Those are my predictions… I could be wrong but I wouldn’t count on it.
