The strengths and weaknesses of Social Media Juggernauts.
Strengths
Mobile Phones - The ever growing popularity of social media has increased in the past ten years of so and a huge part of that is because of the use of mobile phones. By using the completely free mobile app a lot more are able to make an account and start using the site, and connect with people from all over the world.
Brand image - Facebook has an extremely strong brand image from the types of marketing they've been doing for over a decade now and the reliable status of their product. Facebook's popularity has seen grown since its original days and a huge factor is how they've branded themselves and at one point having a film produced about the origins of Facebook with the creator Mark Zuckerberg.
Development - One of the biggest strengths that Facebook posses is the constant development of new ideas for the site with an update roughly every week for the mobile app, the update tackles issues with the app and certain bugs people are experiencing. They also love to add new features to make the users experience more enjoyable such as the new 360 photo where you can see from all angles.
Weaknesses
Market - Even Facebook is one the original social medias along with sites like MySpace and Bebo, Facebook could become similar to them by getting replaced by a newer product where there is more of a buzz around rather than using Facebook ie. People using social media sites such as Twitter or Tumblr.
Cybercrime - Cybercrimes are a huge weakness for Facebook but obviously by no fault of themselves. With a increase in cyber-bullying people are quite scared to let their children on Facebook or to some extent even themselves for fear of threats or worse.
Viruses - Once again through no fault of their own viruses play a huge part in the weakness of Facebook. The constant threat of viruses against Facebook can cause mass terror as a lot of people personal details are stored in the sites database which could life destroying in the wrong hands.
Strengths
Real Time Updates - Twitter provides a great real time update system where people can tweet about something basically as soon as it happens. It cuts off the lack of delay people had to rely on before with newscasts or newspapers.
Periscope - Periscope is a live streaming service users of twitter have become very adjusted to in recent times, its given people a chance to communicate with their favourite internet celebrities and thus created a better bond for user and site.
Exposure - A tweet from a certain celebrity or well known social media user can increase a brands name and revenue in a rapid pace, because of the live update strength I mentioned earlier people always need to have it first so if Justin Bieber tweets about a new product his followers will flock to it in no time.
Weaknesses
Timeline - The timeline feature where it has all of the people that user follows at the start was a good idea but due to an algorithm they implemented it's after completely changing in a way that most users do not agree with a whatsoever, resulting in less traffic for the site.
Decline in Traffic - There has been a huge decline in traffic to twitter, there isn’t that many new users to the site which is becoming a massive problem as the current users are now becoming bored of the product.
Interface - The users of twitter are becoming increasingly more frustrated with how the site runs with all of the "@" to start conversation or how hard it is to find people of the site or new interesting accounts.
Strengths
Aesthetic - The aesthetic of the site is what drew the majority of users to the social networking. The whole just a timeline of photos was not a thing before Instagram and everyone knows if there is something similar they are taking from Intsagram.
Hashtags - With the hashtags feature on the site people can find very similar photos or accounts to their own. It creates a great dynamic where there is constantly new people getting popular and new followers all the time.
Mobile based - The vast majority of users will only the mobile app for Instagram which is a huge plus in my opinion as users can visit the site on the go as much as possible without limitations.
Weaknesses
Key Features only available to paying advertisers - There are some features that only paying advertisers can use resulting in lesser smaller brands or companies being able to have a fair playing for advertising.
Adverts - The growing popularity of using Instagram as way to market has become saturated with bigger brands bringing down the organic nature of the site.
Algorithm - The post sorting algorithm that has implemented has seen a less organic way that a users timeline can be seen and the constant posts by the same people over and over will get boring.
YouTube
Strengths
Family Friendly - A huge strength of YouTube is the fact that parents can let their children use the site freely with a guidance filter on not letting the kids watch anything they want.
Accessibility - It's very easy to a access what you're looking for on the site, there is an audience and YouTuber for whatever that someone is interested for all ages again.
Cheap - It does not cost anything to create content on YouTube and due to that a video creating for free could become viral resulting in a massive increase of popularity of a brand.
Weaknesses
Openness - Due to anyone being able to see a video on YouTube it creates a lot of problems for younger viewers or problems with copyright issues.
Marketing - YouTube has become a sort of saturated site for too much advertisers using the site and taking away from the users own content.