Covid-19 is the new talk of the town and why should it not be? It’s not an everyday phenomena for the entire world to fall frail to a pandemic. (Thank God!)
But it is nothing new at this point in the pandemic to realize everything about the world has been directly or indirectly affected by this crisis. So, in this digital era, social media – our new age friend – has also been drastically afflicted. During lockdown and in quarantine people had no option but to keep engaging with one another through social media.
Ergo, social media apps had to come through with the new needs and digital traits for the people during these times. We as consumers have no clue how tirelessly social engineers had to work during the initial outbreak of the virus in order to keep their apps afloat and keep up the in-app usage. Here’s a rundown of events and instances when major social media sites switched gears in order to keep up with the times:
TikTok over Anything Else
The app Tiktok has been the hit of the year and can be used, to sum up, the year 2020. Tiktok user-base almost doubled after the lockdown in April. More than 315 million new subscribers to the app made it a massive hit. The app is extremely user-friendly and if you can understand and work around its algorithm you can even earn from it. This makes the app super fun and you get to enjoy your quarantine time.
Copycats or Coping Cats?
It was quite evident within a few months of lockdown, the success and popularity TikTok was gaining among the masses. Other social media sites witnessed this shift of consumer interest and started to introduce similar features which looked more like coping strategies at this point.
- Instagram Reels
While copying the Snapchat style and introducing stories worked super well for Instagram, it probably thought it will work wonders for it again to copy TikTok and introduce Reels. Users can create 15 to 30-second videos and put music and upload. However, this copy is considered a big fail by most users.
- Snapchat
Snapchat partnered with Warner Music Group to introduce a selection of music for stories and is currently tested the pairing in Australia. However, unlike TikTok, it still does not offer a feed to scroll through the videos and has not been introduced worldwide.
- YouTube Shorts
YouTube takes center stage with this new feature to remind everyone who the video streaming king is. It allows for making short videos and posts within the app. It is basically a multi-segment camera that lets you attach multiple videos together. This means you can edit videos hassle-free and without having to download any other app. For now, YouTube seems to be catching up with the Tiktok fame as users are super pleased to use these new features.
Facebook on Top
Facebook seized the opportunity to help make digital living simpler and easier. It launched rooms like Zoom in order to allow spaces for video-meetings with no limits to how many users can attend a meeting. It is super user-friendly like many of Facebook’s previous features.
Apart from this, during quarantine, the impressions for online shopping also increased dramatically. Facebook again tried to better maintain the user experience by using Instagram’s visual-friendly format. In order to encourage sales of businesses and help customers find what they are looking for.
It even cross combines its messaging platforms of WhatsApp and Instagram. However, this has been recently announced and will take a while before it becomes mainstream. Zoom and Microsoft Teams became the go-to platforms initially in order to be able to present remotely.
No social media app was offering the features that these apps did. Facebook, here again, used the opportunity to reintroduce its Live Stream feature, which is initially held back in November. It also offered Instagram Live videos with viewing and commenting features allowed from desktops as well for consumer convenience.
