Social media continues to transform the world of communications and marketing. Platforms within the space currently enjoy some of the greatest popularity they have ever seen. October 2021 research from Global WebIndex reveals about 57.6% of the globe’s population uses social media, spending about 2 hours and 27 minutes on platforms each day. Usage spans across generational lines and demographics and unsurprisingly only spiked as COVID-19 lockdowns began to dominate the world. Additional research reveals the typical social media user participates on an average of 6.6 platforms. Some use even more. Current market leader Facebook, with about 2.89 billion monthly active users, was the first platform to cross one billion registered accounts. YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger round out the top five most popular social networks as of October 2021 by the number of active users. While traditional social media platforms remain popular, a growing number are becoming dissatisfied due to concerns about usability, security, and privacy. Centralized servers mean social media companies maintain complete control over data, often selling information to outside entities for marketing and advertising purposes. Centralization also opens up the prospects of hacks exposing critical data and concerns about losing information entirely if there is a system failure. Unsurprisingly, these critical issues have left many wondering how bl...
