A look at the future of communications, which has been and will be forever changed by our need for social interaction.

New phrases for new platforms. The app is where it’s at, as mobile is the fastest growing way to interact. More than 40 percent of people socialize online rather than face to face. And, there are more devices connected to the internet now than people on the earth.

Every minute of the day there are … 100,000 tweets, 2 million google searches, 684,478 pieces of content shared on Facebook, 3,600 Instagram photos posted, and 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube. Every. Minute.

It's not the platform. Yesterday's MySpace is today's Facebook. What we really need to focus on is who's doing the talking? It doesn't matter where they are online, they'll always be talking. Platforms will change, but social media personalities will stay the same.

The company of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, CPP Inc., studied social media users and compared them to personalities - finding that of the two-thirds of adults who use social media (according to Pew researchers), the majority of users had a preference for extroversion and intuition ... They focus on the external world, and want information in a "big-picture way."

Get the entire study here: https://www.cpp.com/PDFs/MBTI_Socmedia_Report.pdf

As the dominant social media platform today - at last count 1.3 billion users worldwide - about 65 percent of of people across all personality types use Facebook, but more Facebookers (75.5 percent) are feeling and judging people ... ENFJ types. Makes sense. They "take the empathetic view" and like things that are scheduled, according to the CPP study.

Twitter enjoys a steady growth and is at about 974 million users, most of which CPP's study indicated are again extraverts who prefer intuition. And, they lean heavily toward thinking and perceiving ... ENTP. Makes sense. They take a more "objective" view like radio or journalism, and have a very "spontaneous" approach to dealing with the world.

Although the study also showed high sensing and feeling users as well.

Social media is more than what we see or access on our phones. It's personality-driven communications. Like the switch from radio to TV did, it WILL change the future of media consumption. Our task? Be flexible. Keep up with the people. Tailor our content for them, not the platform.

Plowing snow? Strike the empathy chord and add a photo of the late night plow driver to Facebook. But tweet the stats, and inches of snow photos. The new road? Post a photo of a kid playing at the ribboncutting (he'll use the road in the future), but tweet the dollar signs and cubic yards.

How does social media change the way you communicate with media, peer groups, communities, each other?

What will we find is the norm in the future? Can we really plan for that?

These are tough questions, with maybe no obvious answers. But keeping an eye on our audiences' personalities can at least guide us into being better communicators.