Smartphones, tablets and other types of mobile devices have opened up a whole range of new opportunities for communicating. Which means they’ve also opened up a whole range of new opportunities for promoting your brand. In particular, there’s the rise of messaging apps as a new form of social media. For instance, there’s Kik Messenger, which combines social media, texting, and IM, allowing you to converse and share content with your friends, privately and mobilely, either one-on-one or in groups. Or Snapchat, which lets you send photo messages to friends in short bursts that last no longer than 10 seconds before disappearing. These messaging apps eliminate the walls and newsfeeds and connect people directly with their social circles. They enable the things their users want, like messaging and sharing content, while eliminating a lot of the extraneous features of other social media platforms. And they’re quickly going from a novelty to a mainstream social media tool. According to a number of experts, these apps represent the future of how people are connecting with one another. Messaging apps are here to stay. Read More