The end of social media?

Are you on Twitter? I am. I like using it to promote these articles. It is a very good way of contacting a large audience, quickly. If you search on twitter "#SocialMedia", you will find endless lists of tweets and articles about the importance of social media for the future of modern businesses.

What is even more interesting, is if you put "#SocialMedia" into any of your tweets, expect to be automatically followed by about a dozen social media gurus! It's an easy way to build followers - if you are into that kind of thing.

It used to be that the only people who were making money out of social media, were the people who were selling social media get rich quick schemes. But the valuation of Facebook at $104 bn last year alluded to the increasing interest of large corporations in what you had for lunch!

When I first used Facebook, it was a large page with all of the content relating to me and the people I knew. As the years have gone by, a bar full of adverts have appeared on the right hand side of my page. Also, the facebook privacy rules keep changing, and I keep having to make sure that they do not use my content to sell other products. Every now and then a note appears saying "Jenny liked McDonalds. Do you like McDonalds?"

I predict that it will not be social media for much longer. It will be corporate media. And all of the fun will have gone from the medium, as every little interaction will prompt manic selling on behalf of interested businesses. The smart people will have moved on to another way of expressing themselves, and this bubble will slowly deflate into the shallow and drab procession that television currently is.