Can Any Messaging Application Beat Standalone Social Networking?

The messaging apps used these days  needs no introduction. They have  become quite popular among mobile friends. These trending messaging service that lets you keep in touch with a neat chat-like interface and allows sharing images, audio and video files instantly. These also provide the feature of forming groups and staying in touch with friends and family all along.

Social networking sites are also no less. They provide almost double the features these messaging applications provide.

So the question arises who will win– Messaging apps or Social networking sites?

Messaging Applications

Some of the widely used Messaging Applications-

• WhatsApp,
•  Viber
• Samsung ChatON,
• BlackBerry Messenger,
• iMessage,
• Facebook Messenger.

All these apps run on android and other java enabled phones and can be easily downloaded and are fun to use . Their important functions are-Unified Mobile Messaging,Multimedia content and current location can be shared,Apps allow sharing of mobile internet access, etc.

Social Networking sites

Some of the widely used Social Networking Sites are-Facebook,Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, MySpace, Google Plus+.Their important functions are-Graph Search, Simple Interface, Prominent and Functional search.

Messaging apps and social networking sites , both are important to people in their own way. But According to a recent study by Flurry, “consumers spent 81 minutes per day using mobile apps, compared to 74 minutes of web surfing. Here’s where it gets even more interesting. Social networking is one of two categories that dominate mobile app usage with 32% and games are responsible for 47%.”

A current trend for social networking websites, such as Facebook, is to create mobile apps to give their users instant and real-time access from their device.

The Winner

Actually, both of these competitors are dependent on each other. You can see that most of the functions provided in social networking sites can now be found in messaging apps. Also Networking sites’ companies are creating messaging apps because they know that this is beneficial.

So, till now both the competitors are ruling 50-50 per cent, but in a few years we would get to know if Messaging applications beat standalone social networking.