The social messaging market is rapidly evolving and expanding as messaging players begin to amass hundreds of millions of users. In 2014 we will see further acceleration in user growth, together with a widening in the scope of social messaging services.
More interestingly, in 2014 Ovum expects to see social messaging players challenging the status quo of mobile social networking and media and creating a paradigm shift in social media that will impact several OTT giants.
According to Ovum’s latest Social Messaging 2014 Trends to Watch report, services such as Line and WhatsApp are mobile first services and are changing the way the consumer interacts with social media – be it messaging, voice, games or utilities and widening the possibilities of the type of social services that can be accessed on mobile.
Social messaging 2014 trends-to-watch:
- A new wave of OTT players will hit the market in 2014
- Expect a fundamental shift in social networking services
- Social messaging will start to generate revenues
- Messaging will evolve beyond text
Social media as an industry is undergoing a major transition, one of the key drivers of which is the rapid proliferation of social messaging services. Social messaging apps are mobile centric services, are intuitive and viral in growth, have the ability to reach a wider audience. As new services get added on to messaging apps, we can expect these services to evolve into mobile media platforms with large user bases.
In addition, we expect social messaging to slowly but surely start to generate revenues, which will assist in the evolution of social messaging players’ offerings from messaging apps to holistic mobile media platforms.
This shift has been driven mainly by mobile-first services due to more consumers accessing social services through mobile devices. The mobile internet used on a variety of mobile devices is rapidly taking off in developed and emerging markets alike and will form the basis of the internet in the future.
There is an increasing shift to mobile devices on either side of the development process and there is no doubt that mobile-first services make fuller use of the advantages of mobile than services that are ported from the PC to mobile.