Trending in the social media world, several companies are facilitating connections online and then transitioning these connections to sustained offline relationships

What is the best way to interact with social media? Like most things in life…with moderation.

While every ping or alert from the latest and greatest social media app sends a dopamine trigger to our brains, we can learn to control our social media technology by adjusting how much time we spend on it each day as well as how we interact with social media more generally. On Joe Rogan’s podcast with Elon Musk, Musk famously guessed that most humans would be about 10% happier, maybe even more, without social media at all and the anxiety that comes along with it. Aside from leveraging social media in moderation, are there other ways to connect social media with real human interaction to improve our lives? Likely yes. There are actually a few technology startups that are trying to address this, with a few of them highlighted below:

#1 Hopin, Zoom 2.0?

Perhaps the fastest-growing company in the digital social media connection cyberspace is Hopin, which calls itself an online events platform where “you can connect with anyone and everyone from around the world.” Hopin helps facilitate the online event and streamlines the host’s ability to sell and process the tickets for the event, as well as monitor the attendance and collect other data from the event.

#2 LunchClub: “Smart Introductions to Relevant People”

Henry Gindt has been a member of LunchClub while living in San Francisco and New York and can’t say enough great things about it. LunchClub uses a search algorithm to pair you up with like-minded business professionals and organizes the coffee or lunch meetup at a mutually convenient location in the city. It’s akin to platonic professional dating, made easy. Typically you will do a few “coffee dates” each week, though there are options to do more meetings for a small fee (and provided you have time). The service is pretty flexible as well, so you can sign up for as few or as many “coffee meeting dates” as you have time for that week. What’s been most impressive about this company from my perspective is how relevant and high-quality the people are on the platform. Notably, these 1:1 meetings have gone virtual during the Covid-19 pandemic and will hopefully resume in-person connections sometime in the near future. As LunchClub grows, I’m hoping the caliber of the people on the platform itself stays high quality and doesn’t deteriorate into business Tinder! Speaking of which, on to #3:

# 3 Bumble, Tinder 2.0 + LinkedIn 2.0 combined

Many of us know Bumble from their women-led dating platform, which connects mutual “swipe rights,” but requires women to initiate the conversation after the match is made. This feature has reportedly reduced the amount of harassment and spam messages from men and created a healthier environment for women (and men) to date compared to the earlier dating apps like Tinder. Of late, Bumble has been expanding beyond dating into two new verticals of “Friend Connections” and “Professional Connections” which it calls bff and bizz, respectively. Feel free to open your app and experiment at home yourself. Simply go to settings on the home screen and toggle the mode from the date default setting to bff (for finding friends) or bizz (for making business connections)!

Some other companies to keep an eye out for include Run The World (interactive events), Glimpse (matchmaking social video chats), and ClubHouse (audio chat rooms where you can pop in…almost like crashing a podcast 😉

Happy digital networking! Feel free to visit us or share feedback and thoughts at GoCheezy.