Social Media market:

Opportunities : very big market. e.g. Instagram and TikTok has more than a Billion MAUs. It is also a prime real estate to monetise

Barrier to Entry : While any company can build the app but not many companies can support the scale to support billions of users. Also, it is not easy to acquire users specially content creators. Google has once tried and failed.

Tech stack : It might be much easier job to just build an application. But most of the companies may not be able to scale much.

Future Growth : Social media is yet to hit hits zenith, specially in the developing countries. Billions of users are yet to start using social media.

Social Media :

To build a social media, one needs two sets of users.

• Viewers
  • Engage with only more interesting content
  • Looking to get entertained
• Content Creators
  • Looking for easy to create content
  • Want more visibility of the cntent.

Content can also be further categories into,

• User Generated or companies/brand generated (Netflix, Hot Star
• Let’s keep our discussion to Pure User Generated ( as the discussion is more about social media)

Types of content can be :

• Pure text ( e.g. Twitter)
• Photos/images (e.g. instagram)
• Videos( e.g.Tiktok)

Google portfolio analysis :

• Android is a mobile OS installed in close to 3 billion devices
  • Majority of the users take photos through mobile and upload them social media network like FB/instagram
  • All of these photos created in Android is easily available and managed by google photos.
• You tube
  • users have already created billions of videos ( primarily long form or medium form)
  • but has recently allowed short form videos in stories.
• Photos app is also one of the most successful apps across devices.
  • It has billions of users, and majority of users upload few photos from their mobile device into social media
• Google already handles billions of users on their products

Why did google fail earlier ?

• While google plus failed a long time back, one of the major attribution can be done that platform was not engaging enough for the lack of good content
  • Back then content was primarily text driven and content creation tools were not good
  • Also it was linked all the gsuite forcing users to be constrained to gmail id.

Recommendation :

• Google depends heavily on ad revenues through search. With the onslaught of social media, majority of the users are discovering content through apps like FB, twitter, and these companies have already taken a big pied of advertising market. 
  • To de-risk heavy dependency on search ad revenues, it becomes important to consider other opportunities. 
• Google should try their hand at social media again in two forms of content
  • Photos
  • Videos
• Reasons for recommendations
  • Content creation is not a problem for google, it already has billions of users in both forms of content
    • In fact memories in the google photos has already received great engagement
    • stories on you tube has seen good traction
  • Also do not tie the user to gmail id per say, enable mobile number based login to see explosive growth
  • As for the viewers, both photos and you tube already has billions of users, and many of these users are already sharing their content e.g. many people create the album and share it with their friends.

1. Clarifications:-
   1. Is there any specific reason/objective due to which Google is thinking about this option? make ur own assumption –> drive monetization
   2. What is the current state of Google business/product? any issue being faced ?No such issues
2. Think about social media in isolation.
   1. Social media –> has influential network which helps brands drive brand awareness sales, Ads are more relevant to the users as more contextual, helps build social experiences for users
3. Description of the product:-
   1. Google is a big organization which has plethora of products ranging from productivity, marketplaces, search etc with the mission of organizing world’s information and making it universally useful and accessible to all.
   2. In order to focus better I am going to focus on marketplace products of Google as they are more close to social platforms like you tube is it fine?
   3. Users –
      1. Viewers, creators, advertisers
   4. Problem it solves – organizes videos of all sorts such that users can easily access any video at any time from anywhere.
   5. Strengths –
      1. Exhaustive content – since it exists for quite some time, it has really very exhaustive content on any topic so its literally the library of video content.
      2. It is the destination for on demand videos as in if a user wants to search for a video, Youtube is the platform for finding the required material.
      3. Since viewers consider Youtube as the main channel for searching videos, creators also consider it the destination for creating their content.
   6. Weakness :-
      1. Monetization – Dependence on ads for most of the revenue while users usually don’t like ads when they are specifically searching for specific content.
      2. Lack of in platform engagement and thus youtube just becomes a video rendering/streaming platform and is not getting lot of info on who are the users so that it can think from customer perspective and keep the product competitive. Since it does not have a moat/unique feature, it will become easier for competitors to overtake you tube. Even creators have their fans on other platform, they create videos on you tube and share it on other platforms where they engage with fans.
4. Choices
   1. Launch a Social media platform
   2. Not launch a social media platform
5. Evaluation based on:-
   1. Customer experience
      1. Pro: –
         1. Customers are more likely to trust the source of information if it is something liked by their friends or loved ones instead of relying on likes of unknown users. Thus customer experience for youtube videos can be hugely improved if it was a kind of social media where users had friends
         2. Currently if users want to discuss about a specific you tube video, they would share the same on other social media platform like facebook, whatsapp. If friends are on youtube itself then no need to take the extra steps to share. Also they can tag their friends then and there.
         3. For video creators – will become easier to popularize their videos, currently they also need to share their videos on their profile on social media platforms where they have their fans/influence.
      2. Cons :-
         1. Customers might feel privacy breach as they are used to searching for youtube videos in anonymity and don’t want themselves to be tracked or their friends to know as they might be searching youtube for self help videos for example.
   2. Monetization
      1. Pro
         1. Ads might become more trust worthy as u might see that the same ad is shared by your friends or liked by your friends thus more reliability.
      2. Con
         1. Still dependence will be on ads. Instead if focus is monetization other options can be explored like building shopping experience within youtube –> if a user watches a video, give option to shop items relevant to the video from you tube itself. OR once ad is shown, option to buy the item from youtube –> earn from transaction fees. Also considering Google already has Google shopping a product, it should be fairly easy to integrate.
   1. Effort
      1. Con –
         1. the effort as well as mantainence of this feature would be quite high as this is completely different from the suite of products google already has.
         2. Also will change the videos which are shown at the top to the user when user searches for content –> show videos which have highest popularity or popular in user’s network… can be confusing for the user.
   2. Market trends
      1. Pros:-
         1. Specially in times of pandemic where users are unable to meet their friends and loved ones, they are trying to find ways to connect with each other and if youtube launches something currently, it might catch attention as users are hungry to interact with friends.
      2. Cons –
         1. Users are more and more concerned about privacy and they view Youtube as a video search engine and won’t want their friends to know what they are searching or liking as some topics can be quite personal.
6. Based on the above evaluation, I would want to recommend that Google should not invest in social media since Google’s mission is to organize world’s information and make it useful and accessible to all, introducing social media does not help in this mission and as explained above can create confusion with the content shown to users as it might be content liked by their network of friends but might not be the most useful content as per customer’s usecase. Also for monetization there are other options available which are a more direct extension of the service currently offered.