Social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok have grown at a very aggressive pace. For each age group of users, these platforms are slightly different. But one thing that almost all the users on these social media apps are doing is consuming content in a more immersive way than in the boring old world of text/blogs.
Especially young people. Old people are accustomed to searching for content in a particular way. Mostly old users go to Google for their search queries about food places in a particular location. Not the youngsters, though.
As per a Petapixel report, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s Senior Vice President, recently said that the queries that new internet users ask for are completely different. These users don’t really use keywords to search. Instead, they discover content in new and more immersive ways.
Raghavan said that 40% of the young people, when they go looking for a place to get lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search; they go to Instagram or TikTok. The data for this was observed in a study done for users between the age of 18 and 24.
It makes sense as well. Most social media apps now allow location tagging options on their users’ posts. This allows users to just search for a particular location and see all the cool things there and understand where most of the hip crowd is moving towards.
Should Google be Worried?
The future is all about immersive content. Google is mostly traditional methods of searching content through keywords. The growth of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok has been unprecedented, and it is not going to stop here. Most users are only discovering these platforms for the first time in their lives. The number of users on these platforms is only going to grow, and it should give Google tough competition in the future. But Google is more than just searching for locations. Thus, the broad information available on Google makes it way bigger than these platforms. So, there’s no real threat to Google from these social media platforms as of now.
