The social media game is not the same as it was a decade ago

For more than a decade, social media platforms have seen extreme highs when it comes to advertisement revenues and user growth but are things the same? Elon Musk is capable of thinking out of the box and may change the social media game. Let’s look at how the game can play out.

Twitter

Musk will need to take a hard look at the bottom line and come up with ways to make investors happy as well as pay the money Twitter owes banks. Expect Twitter to promote its Twitter Blue package.

The problem at hand: He has to deal with staff revolt and many may leave as soon as he makes his presence felt. The top management is undergoing a massive change.

Hope floats: Now that Twitter will stop being a publicly-traded company, he won’t have pressures of the market. He can come up with ways to push Twitter Blue subscription and offer an out-of-the-box cure for the platform, which has rarely turned in big profits.

Meta

Meta has spent huge amounts of money in its rebranding as well as investing in the so-called metaverse. Its Oculus dreams around the metaverse can best be described as an emerging technology and it won’t make investors happy in the short run. Young users in the West are spending more hours on TikTok and the loyalty of creators seems to have shifted. Further, Meta has also lost billions of dollars in advertising revenue because of changes Apple made in 2021 to its mobile operating system, which made it harder for apps to track users across the Internet.

The problem at hand: Control costs, win back users from TikTok.

Hope floats: Mark Zuckerberg has always managed to make a comeback and the company’s future technology looks promising.

Snapchat

The platform continues to be attractive among the youth but its advertising business has taken a hit and the company recently laid off roughly 20 per cent of its workers. Snapchat too has been a victim of Apple’s privacy changes but Snap is not complaining as much as Meta.

The problem at hand: Rebooting its ad business.

Hope floats: Youngsters are still using Snapchat and daily active users continue to grow.