Social Media Users Are Migratory

Long time back, during the early days of Internet, I read a futuristic book called ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ which started out with a radical thought (at that time) - Markets are conversations.
If you look closely at most of our online activities, we can see that almost all the activities are some sort of conversations - from searching to shopping. Also, whole new businesses and platforms are built on daily basis in the digital space based on conversations - Social Media



My take is that digital technology has impacted a lot in terms of ease and reach of our conversations. However, its impact on the increased volume of conversations would be marginal. What I mean is that the amount of an individuals conversation has not grown drastically from what it was before the penetration of technology. Just because there is something better tomorrow does not mean that I will increase my individual capacity or change my inherent behaviour to speak more.

What has been driving the growth of Social Media is the increased number of new users joining the platforms, globally, either through geographies or through devices.

This phenomenon affects most in the users use of social media platforms, where most the activities are conversational in nature. Since we cannot increase the volume of our conversations substantially, we tend to pick platforms that are most popular at that point of time & which suits our requirement the best. As we pick and start using a particular platform, our usage of the previous platform decreases, and as time goes by completely disappears. This is a continuous process. Imagine, how we have migrated from days of using USENET>> IMC>> AOL>> Yahoo! Chats>> MSN Messenger>> Orkut >>to the current favourites like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc

While we might embrace new technologies, but as long as there is a limit in terms of our conversations and the time we have on hand for the same, we will keep migrating from one platform to another based on ease of use or reach of that particular platform

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