Over again Google has attempted to introduce many products as social networks in competition with other tech companies like Google Plus in 2011 which was created to compete with Facebook and Twitter- this was shut down in 2018 due to a series of negative reviews and data breaches. Same as with YouTube which has been presented as a social network many times but most people still don’t consider the platform anything other than a video sharing platform.

In spite of the fact, it has an overwhelming number of views for brand-related content from user-generated content. More than 84 percent tune-in at least once a month to get a daily dose of news from their favorite channels and then log out. Now, Google is tethering towards pushing YouTube, the thriving video-sharing community to house a new feature known as “shorts” to rival TikTok. However, this isn’t the first time that YouTube has developed its own version of a popular feature on another social platform: it brought over its version of Instagram Stories to the platform. There have been many social media platform adoptions from MySpace in 2005, to Facebook in 2008, then Instagram, and a brief interlude of Snapchat in 2014.

In 2020, the newest contender is TikTok, a mix of music lip-syncing and micro-video content platform. The video-sharing platform, TikTok, has taken the world by storm becoming the rave of the moment beyond China where the idea was birthed as Douyin, a rival to musical.ly, which was later acquired and merged under a single name.