Social App Predictions for 2019
Greg Isenberg, an Indicator Venture Partner and social guru, recently released his list of social app predictions for the New Year.
Not only is Greg part of the Indicator Team, he is also the Founder and CEO of Islands, a group messaging platform and Indicator portfolio company. Greg is a mobile product, growth hacking and user acquisition expert. He has built marketing and social media campaigns for large brands (FedEx, TechCrunch, NASCAR), helped to develop the world’s most popular stock market simulator (Wall Street Survivor), and founded companies that were later acquired by large technology companies (5by acquired by StumbleUpon in 2013).
Over the course of his career, Greg has established himself as a thought leader in the social space and is regularly tapped by publications from Mashable to the LA Times. This list features some bold statements and offers an inside-look at the different trends Greg is predicting for the year ahead.
1/ The rush to win community begins… Instagram, Facebook, Snap, Twitter will RUSH to inject community into their core apps as people shift away from broadcast. One app will win the lion’s share of community mindshare
2/ Instagram will add events. It will be implemented elegantly and be WILDLY successful
3/ A find your friends app (i.e: Snap Map or something else) will hit scale. Location + messaging for gen z is not an if BUT when in ’19
4/ Tik Tok will struggle to maintain relevancy in 2019 in North America. We will see how Tik Tok evolves with the lightning in the bottle they CURRENTLY have
5/ Instagram will implement one VERY controversial UI change similar to the recent horizontal feed “bug” we saw last week
6/ There will be 2+ vertical GROUP CHAT networks that will hit 400M+ valuations by end of year
7/ Pseudonymity is back BABY and startups will be leading the experimentation. The big social apps will be paying attention but not experimenting because health of their networks is a continued priority in ’19
8/ Snapchat will CONTINUE to be the pioneer AR. This will fuel some growth for Snap and fuel motivation for Instagram to attempt to get ahead by 2020
Check out Greg’s original Twitter post here.
