Social media isn't very social anymore.

In which we fear for our jobs.

Hi,

Hot out, innit? My fingers are literally gliding across my keyboard today, lubricated by sweat. An iced coffee rests by my side, a Dyson fan blows lackadaisically in my direction, and I’m thinking about social media again.

It’s bloody hot.

But you know what isn’t hot right now? (Nice). Social media, apparently.

At least, so says Business Insider:

The central thrust of this piece is that “people have run into the consequences of constant sharing, social media has become less social — and users are shifting to messaging apps and group chats.”

Is this true? It feels true. I’ve certainly sensed a sort of retreat from social media, and people seem less… present than usual? And as much as that’s a backlash to years of over-sharing, I have a side theory. As usual, I blame Elon.

Twitter didn’t just kill Twitter.

For the best part of a decade, Twitter was the Town Square of the internet. Yes, that’s a somewhat reductionist way to put it, and I apologise for my blatant Tumblr erasure. For many people like myself, Twitter was the heartbeat of the internet. I constantly had Tweetdeck open on a second monitor, the constant ticker of chat providing a background pulse that felt like a living thing.

If something was happening, you could see it. The feed would be racing. You’d see the same picture or variations of it cropping up repeatedly. There would be daily conversations, Main Characters of the day, recurring trends and memes, etc.

It also acted as a hub for the rest of the internet. Viral Reddit threads became talking points, and even the best of Tumblr found its way over there. Twitter is how I got into TikTok - eventually persuaded by the deluge of cross-posted content.

But now that Twitter has basically imploded, folks have retreated. The Town Square doesn’t seem to exist anymore. We still have ‘Days’ - Trump Mugshot Day being a recent example. But previously, every day would be a Day, and now, Days are few and far between. Remember PigGate? Now that was a Day.

It’s not like that Town Square even lives somewhere else now. Try as they might, BlueSky, Threads, and Mastodon don’t have the same feel. People keep talking about a Twitter exodus, but it’s not like people are going elsewhere. They’re just going quiet.

When the people leave, only the brands remain.

People can leave social platforms, but brands rarely do. A few folks have made a fuss about leaving Twitter, and fair play to them. But many social teams don’t have the luxury of dropping entire channels. They’ll take any reach they can get.

So platforms become ghost towns, with Brands the only living inhabitants. The platform where this has most clearly happened is, of course, Facebook. How often do you personally post to Facebook? My last post was 337 days ago. We last posted on our Facebook brand account yesterday. Scroll through your feed; how many real folks do you see? As opposed to brands, news media, and meme pages?

Pity the brands. They need to operate out in the open. If everyone retreats to Close Friends, Group Chats, and Discord channels, brands get left out in the lurch.

But is the Ghost Town-ificiation of social media necessarily bad for brands?

Social has always been sink or swim.

Who are we kidding? Social marketing has always been a game of adapting. Pivot to video, pivot to “authentic”, pivot to whatever “community” means today. The ‘pivot to private’ is just another bump on the road. Seasoned social media managers are used to such things.

I’d encourage folks to see this not as a looming apocalypse that puts us all out of jobs but as an opportunity to engage folks in new ways.

Take an awareness campaign, for example. A classic strategy for this is the ‘big bang’ approach. Go big on all channels simultaneously, and try and get everyone talking. Becoming the #1 trending topic for the day was the aim here, and when it worked, it worked. But how do you make a big bang when everything’s behind closed doors? How can you possibly go viral in these conditions?

Tricky questions, but I think it’s just a case of upturning your assumptions:

Old way: Create great content that people share with their networks, creating virality.

New way: Create great content that people share with the private networks, creating ‘dark virality’.

Dark virality. Is that a thing? Did I just coin a thing?

By Dark Virality, I mean achieving virality across private social spaces. You might not be the top Trending Topic, but if you’re the number one thing being shared in group WhatsApps, that’s still a huge win.

And one thing to notice - both the old and new way start with “create great content”. It’s just about being realistic about what people will do with it. What are people willing to share with their private networks? How is that different to what they were willing to share publicly? I think those are the questions to answer. And I don’t have the answers!

All is not lost.

So I hope that gives you some hope. Social media is constantly changing.

Maybe in five years, we’ll see over-sharing becoming a trend again, and we’ll once again spam our Facebook friend feeds with every song we listen to on Spotify.

But right now, the question I’m trying to answer is how to keep creating shareable content that can find its way into spaces where brands aren’t typically invited.

How the hell you measure any of that is another question entirely. But let’s worry about that another time…

Thanks for reading. Stay cool out there.