Vero

Let’s start with a very promis­ing “new­bie” (2015) who is a direct com­peti­tor to giant known only as Insta­gram. It is an app, where its user can share not only pho­tos and videos, but also movies, TV, music, books, places, and links. What makes it inter­est­ing, apart from this, is the fact that it’s ad-free and algo­rithm-free social net­work. Its mot­to is pret­ty clear: “less media, more social”. Vero was launched back in 2015, and in the last few months, it became one of the most pop­u­lar free apps on App Store.

There is a cou­ple of inter­est­ing dif­fer­ences than you are used to from Insta­gram. First­ly, you can set who will see your con­tent – you can share it with close friends, friends, acquain­tances, and fol­low­ers. You can also cre­ate col­lec­tions, and divide your posts into photos/videos, links, music, movies/tv, books, and places. Anoth­er part of it is also a chat. The com­plex­i­ty, togeth­er with a nice, log­i­cal struc­ture, is giv­ing the app some real potential.

TikTok

This one should ring a bell, Tik­Tok (2017) is not a new­bie exact­ly, but a real deal among younger users. Pre­vi­ous­ly known as a Musical.ly, the app is based on shar­ing short-form videos. As you may prob­a­bly know it main­ly for a lip-sync­ing, but it’s not only some karaoke app, rather it’s famous for its act-out memes and clips, which are end­less­ly repro­duced and remixed.

The plat­form is a favorite among young­sters, thanks to its sim­plic­i­ty. As explained on TechCrunch, com­pared to cul­ture wars in Twit­ter, hate­ful, exploitive, or dan­ger­ous con­tent on YouTube, and Face­book con­tribut­ing to war crimes and the top­pling of democ­ra­cy, Tik­Tok is sim­ply fun.

More­over, Tik­Tok is cur­rent­ly the fourth most down­loaded app (first in App Store) and already test­ing in-app advertising.

Lasso

What makes the per­fect con­tent on social media? Video and short dura­tion. Above men­tioned Tik­Tok is an evi­dent prove, and this new­bie from Face­book fam­i­ly is anoth­er one. Las­so (2018) is a video-based plat­form, where users record them­selves danc­ing and lip-sync­ing, or they can eas­i­ly record short clips (like Vines). It is obvi­ous­ly Facebook’s answer to Tik­Tok and tries to gain younger users.

This is also a sim­ple sign for all mar­keters. When it comes to a younger audi­ence, the way of short-video for­mat is a key. Once Face­book sees Tik­Tok as a com­pe­ti­tion and invests to the for­mat, you should keep that way in your mind as well. And we’ll see which of the giants will be even­tu­al­ly more suc­cess­ful. So far, the app is avail­able only in select regions.

Steemit

Let’s move to maybe a bit more alter­na­tive social media net­work. Steemit (2016) is based on sim­i­lar prin­ci­ples as Red­dit, that means users can upvote and down­vote the con­tent. But besides that, they can also make some mon­ey for it, to be com­plete­ly spe­cif­ic you can earn the Steem cryp­tocur­ren­cy. The plat­form is part­ly blog­ging, part­ly social net­work, and the idea is to enable users to get anoth­er reward for their pub­lish work over likes.

Not only shared con­tent is paid, but you can also earn Steem for com­ment­ing or upvot­ing the posts there. The sys­tem of pay­ment is then divid­ed into three groups – when­ev­er you cre­ate new con­tent, you can decide whether you will receive 50 per­cent in Steem and 50 per­cent in Steem dol­lars, or the entire amount in Steem Power.

Mastodon.social

The last men­tioned social media net­work is an alter­na­tive to Twit­ter. Mastodon.social (2016) is decen­tral­ized and open-source plat­form with no com­mer­cial inten­tions – no adver­tis­ing, no data-min­ing, no paid sec­tions. As the users are used to, they can share mes­sages, pho­tos, or videos with­in the lim­it of 500 char­ac­ters. All the con­tent is lat­er dis­played in chrono­log­i­cal order.

The unique dif­fer­ence is in its decen­tral­iza­tion, as men­tioned, mean­ing any­one can cre­ate and run a serv­er of Mastodon (called instance). Every instance has its rules; users can join them and fol­low their con­tent. Besides that, users from dif­fer­ent instances can also fol­low each oth­er. The thing here is that there is nobody above every­one, just a space for as many dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties as you wish.