Social Media faces some special challenges, Twitter is a great example. In the past year they've made various changes to their platform, in an effort to drive u

Social Media faces some special challenges, Twitter is a great example. In the past year they've made various changes to their platform, in an effort to drive up their revenue. All of the changes they made were loathed by users, which reduces their membership and hurts their revenue. This is my opinion, I might be wrong, but I think social media is not a viable business. I do not believe anyone has shown a way to monetize it yet. Facebook hasn't monetized social media, they've monetized Facebook, one fraction of which is a social media product, which makes no money. Social media only exists, I believe, because the technical hurdles of setting up a personal blog were too great at one point. But it is becoming easier and cheaper. I think in the long term people will abandon corporate controlled products like Facebook and Twitter in favor of user controlled products like Wordpress. The 'following' system is the only feature which keeps corporate social media afloat, and RSS or something like it will always be around as a viable alternative.