5 Things That Were Meant To Be Huge In Social Media But Never Took Off

If you are immersed in the social media industry, you will be used to the endless rounds of hype around new products, services and features that launch on a daily basis. Every single day, it feels like there is always something new that you should be trying that’s going to be a game changer and that you need to read up about. We are as guilty as anybody of writing about all the latest tools many of which you never end up using, but I wanted to take a look at an even higher level and find some of the things that pretty much everybody agreed was going to be massive but have ended up flopping. Not all of these are totally dead yet, but there certainly aren’t as many people using these features as was once expected.

Checkins

Foursquare and Gowalla brought this word into the mainstream a couple of years ago before it was copied by everybody from Facebook to Google. Foursquare still has some decent growth and is doing well in the USA, but the notion of actually checking into places is not something that appealed most people.

Facebook even put the checkin button front and center of their mobile apps for three months and even that didn’t tempt people. Facebook then pretty much killed the checkin and are phasing it out. However, they did end up buying Gowala recently although it’s believed that is more about talent rather than trying to crack the checkin. Foursquare ploughs on ahead but many of their latest efforts have been focused on moving away from the checkin. Turns out people don’t actually want to checkin to places in the real world all that much.

Facebook Deals

Nobody is better at seeing what is taking off elsewhere and trying to copy it themselves than Facebook. When they saw Groupon and other daily deal sites springing up and having huge success, Facebook launched their own deal offers. There were deals by city, deals with friends and all sorts of other initiatives but they fizzled out nearly as fast as they launched. You only have to watch the video below though to see how important Facebook thought deals would become at one stage.

Groups, Lists And Circles

For the last two or three years, the big social networks have been obsessed with making us all create groups, lists or circles containing all our friends. There are Twitter lists, Facebook groups and recently, Google circles. Although a small minority of people are using them, most people just can’t be bothered putting in the effort.

The simple problem here is that it is too much hard work. Nobody wants to spend their time constantly re-arranging their friends and contacts into lists or groups. This is a classic example of something that looks good on paper but simply doesn’t work.

Google +

I’m early on this one and I’ll get plenty of the passionate users giving out about this being included on the list but it just isn’t taking off. People say it was never meant to compete with Facebook and that it is a social layer or some other rubbish like that, but the simple fact is that after lots of initial hype, people just are not using it.

There is a hardcore community of about 47 geeks that use it on a daily basis and swear by it, but despite all their amazing features, huge marketing push and integration with other Google products, there just doesn’t seem to be much appetite for it. Brands and businesses were very quick to build pages and establish a presence but it’s like shouting into an empty room at the moment.

Quora

You may remember at the turn of the year Quora suddenly jumped into the mainstream and it felt as if everybody was on it. People were even saying it could be the next service to take on Twitter and Facebook. While it is fantastically useful and the quality of answers on the site remains high, it is essentially only taking off for a very techie audience.

The mainstream had a very quick look at it, decided they didn’t want to spend their time answering questions and headed back to their usual social haunts. Still doing well and getting some good growth but mainstream it certainly isn’t.