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04/09/2013 by
3976 views

Taking Social Back!

In the beginning social was solely focused on the individual user who needed a way to connect with others on-line.

Taking Social Back!

That need gave way for early sites such as Sixdegrees, LiveJournal, and Friendster.

As more and more people discovered these sites and their uses, the need for information and interaction had only increased giving way for even bigger sites such as MySpace, LinkedIn, and Orkut.

Once these became popular then social truly exploded giving way for the much bigger sites like Facebook, YouTube, Bebo, and Twitter.

Once we had major sites functioning and connecting everyone more and more social tools, apps, and sites starting popping up (Tumblr, Foursquare, Instagram, Pinterest, and GooglePlus) giving you everything you need. As this happened two problems arose for the individual user:

  1. These sites needed to start making money and big businesses wanted a way to access these large groups of people. This led to businesses integrating themselves into the various sites which took focus off the regular person and put it on big business. This gave way for sites to develop tools and special accounts so that businesses could co-exist and interact with the regular social users. This also allowed businesses to flood social feeds with advertisements and sponsored posts. These sponsored posts overall take focus away from t individuals and puts it into selling something to individuals.
  2. With the rise of so many different sites (along with the fact that after 2006 not many shut down as had happened previously) individuals were provided with too many choices and specialty sites to choose from so they started joining multiple networks. Now you have the problem of how to manage all of the different sites that you belong to since all of the management tools were geared toward businesses and marketers.

Over time people have dealt with these problems in various ways. They have either cut down on the networks they use, found ways to block the advertisements, or just simply deal with it.

Social has become so ingrained into our daily lives that nobody wants to become “disconnected” by not using it, yet nobody has given the individual user a solution.

So that brings us to present day, where there are an estimated 1.4 Billion users with an estimated 5 Billion social user accounts among the top 13 social sites. This means that if you split that evenly that 1/7 of the entire world is using 3 or more social networks.

These users are connecting via their PCs, tablets, and mobile devices leaving them in constant social contact.

So will anyone be able to truly bring social back to only focus on the user? I know that some are trying right now and that it is too soon to tell if they will be able to accomplish it without the major social giants getting in the way. 

Until then the number of social users is only going to keep growing, as well as the ways they try to get around ads, promoted posts, and unwanted material!

SocialPoint.me

Overview

Social is growing at an enormous rate and as they grow so must the revenue streams. We have not lost the complete focus of the social giants, but as time passes more is put on them making money and less on how to better optimize for the current base.

SocialPoint.me

Currently SocialPoint.me is a company trying to help put social back into the hands of the users by creating a social management tool built for the individual social user.

SocialPoint allows users to connect their top social feeds while providing custom features including – social filters, social contacts, social presets, complete social search, and social posting options.  SocialPoint.me also has an Android and iOS app available.

What About You?
What social connecting apps do you already use? What do you miss in them?

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About the Author
Written by Chris Burnett, a young marketing professional who specializes in many different fields including online media, advertising, video, gaming, and social media for the last 6 years.  His main focus has been with helping smaller businesses and growing star-up companies.  Chris have worked on a variety of different projects including gameland.com, OurTown.com, vADz.com, and his latest project of SocialPoint.me.