Notably Short-Lived Social Media Platforms

The key to successful social media management is the ability to read the landscape quickly and react accordingly, with the best media plans being shaped and moulded whilst they are being put into action.

This does not only concern the content in question but also where and how it is presented, with a bewildering array of social media platforms that show up and become omnipresent in the blink of an eye.

In some cases, they also disappear just as quickly, such as was the case with BeReal, an “antidote to Instagram” that exploded in popularity from a million users to 20m in seven months and then dropped back down 6m in just five more months.

In this case, BeReal was something of a curious novelty that a lot of people tried and then rejected. Here are some other examples of social media platforms that aimed to be the centrepiece of how we live and do business before vanishing rapidly.

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TeeBeeDee

Designed to be the baby boomers’ answer to Facebook and Myspace, TeeBeeDee was launched in 2007 and seemed to put its best foot forward in providing a well-built social media service before it was common for older users to have Facebook accounts.

It lasted just over two years, shutting down in 2009 thanks to a fundamentally broken business model.

Essentially the issue was that it launched during an influx of social media platforms, its core audience was people who at the time were not as active on the platform, and unlike the much more successful LinkedIn, there was no way to use the site to build a professional network.

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Phez

Whilst the source code for the Reddit-inspired platform Phez still exists, the platform that aimed to reward contributors with Bitcoin and promoted itself as a free speech platform went about as well as one could expect.

Part of the problem was that Reddit already existed and for most people that was an acceptable platform, and the monetary reward appeared to have the opposite effect of encouraging frequent and high-quality content contributions, instead leading to people trying to game the system.

Without any outside funding, the platform was always going to struggle to grow and ultimately would disappear within a year.