Obviously, social networking is becoming more and more saturated. Evidence of this growing saturation is the declining number of new sign-ups on almost all social network sites.
The odd part is that more social media sites are going live almost every month so this contributes greatly to the declining number of new members on pioneering social networks. The future of social networking therefore is being closely examined by technology experts.Their are many questions like Will websites be the Social Networks of the future? or What is our personal saturation level for social media?
One of the biggest effects that may happen due to social networking saturation is the elimination of new players in the industry. Are we reaching the social media saturation point? this question popped up in my mind when i saw the spam invitations of so many websites in general public forums. New websites fetch the user emails and send them auto generated invitations to get more and more sign-ups. Pioneering and highly established social network sites have a large stable base of users so this is not their problem.For example if we talk about the Facebook then the majority of its users lies in the US but this social network is gradually shift over Asia with a scoop reach in India and near by country.On the other hand another popular social network like Orkut is massively popular in Brazil,Pakistan and in India. What the difference? The user interests are very fluctuating in nature and if we discuss it over specific area like India then we will find that users like celebrities,cricketers,musicians and others are now only on Facebook.Why not in Orkut ?
New players on the other hand are still struggling to reach even 1 million users. With slim user base, the only practical option for new social networking players is to drop out of the competition. Otherwise, they will remain in oblivion or will not be profitable enough which could force their owners to close shop. Established social networking sites meanwhile may experience a big drop in new sign-ups but this does not mean eventual demise for them. The most logical step for these social network sites to remain competitive is to provide more valuable applications that can be used by the enterprise.
Gone were the days when social networking was used primarily for entertainment and for growing personal online networks(a recent study also reveals that “Half Of Kiwi Teens Post Sensitive Info Online” ) . Today, businesses are using social networking as an important enterprise tool. These are the new power users of social networks and site owners should focus more on the needs and demands of their business users in order to survive.
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