Social media as we know it is dead
Dead is probably an extreme word. But can today's social media really be called social media, or has it evolved into something else?
The Dispash has been on hiatus for a number of reasons, mostly work related. Firstly, I launched a personal finance publication. It’s been nice flexing the old journalism training. Then there’s been a brand campaign. And a few other things as well. Turns out if you want some space to write and examine trends in depth, just wait until your child inevitably picks up a bug from somewhere. Although if I hadn’t already written about the cost of living crisis, I would have done this week.
Normal service is intended to resume from now.
Probably.
Onwards.
What exactly is social media in 2022?
How is social media defined? That might seem like an odd question, but few, if any, media channels need defining beyond their core function.
TV is TV. Streaming is streaming. Podcasts are podcasts. News publishers may vary exactly how they deliver news but they still publish news. But Facebook is not the same as TikTok and TikTok isn't the same as Snapchat, who describe themselves as a camera company.
Twitter has described itself as a news company, while Pinterest is probably closer to a search engine, while LinkedIn fits somewhere between classified advertising, a digital rolodex and a management magazine for senior professionals.
Does this matter? It depends what field you work in. Media planners and buyers will look at this question differently to those who have a focus on earned media or reputation management and their answers will be different today compared to a decade ago.
Part of this is due to the emergence of TikTok and Meta's determination to copy every aspect of the platform, but then TikTok is as much a broadcasting platform as it is a social media platform.
Much of what would be described as "classic" social media platforms have become broadcasters partly out of necessity and partly out of a lack of imagination.
Then platforms such as Discord and Geneva, which are closer to the original definition of social than Facebook's algorithmic video-focused newsfeed, are definitely not the same as TikTok but don't tend to lead social media debates/
This is partly because they're harder to scale but partly because they're a lot harder to understand for new users. Their barriers to entry are different to TikTok's barriers for entry.
But if you subscribe to the view that TikTok is the future of advertising - which may not be an unreasonable assumption - and that Facebook is dying (again, not unreasonable although also not true), then what does this actually mean for those of us who live and work side-by-side with these industries?
Social media in a pre-Facebook era
Defining social media today requires us to define social media in the past. Social media existed in some form before MySpace and Facebook. It existed before the internet.
As humans, we've tended to define ourselves by our lifestyles and interests. Parents gravitate towards other parents. Mods and punks sought out other mods and punks. Greek philosophers started discussions with other Greek philosophers.
It also made the emergence of email lists and then forums in the early days of the internet entirely unsurprising.
Livejournal - the forerunner of Tumblr - was an easy place to quickly find individuals with similar interests. A lot of football fans moved from printed fanzines to club specific Internet forums - many of which are still alive. Flickr was Instagram for photography enthusiasts before mobile phones.
If this was Social 1.0, it was disparate and filed away. If you were a passionate fan of Slayer, there was a chat room, possibly on Yahoo, and a forum.
If you had no interest in hair metal, sport, or Coronation Street, you were very unlikely to stumble across anything related to this. Your knowledge would be gleaned from TV, Radio and Print.
So what changed? It’s easy to say social media happened, but social media sites like Faceparty had also been around before MySpace and Facebook, which were predominantly focused at a younger demographic when they launched, and WhatsApp groups aren't really that different from MSN Messenger chats.
In the UK, meanwhile, Friends Reunited was one of the biggest social networking sites for anybody over 30 and ITV’s purchase of the site is still probably one of the biggest strategic and tactical blunders that the internet has seen.
All of which is to say that Facebook didn’t really invent social, even if it took the bits that worked from elsewhere and did them better. It probably wasn't even the catalyst for Social 2.0. That was Apple.
Social 2.0: The era of mobile
Social today looks very different from social the mid 2000s. whenYouTube was the only major network to really move on advertising.
Facebook was still a place where you awkwardly collected old work colleagues, friends and acquaintances to play Words With Friends and upload bad pictures from nights out. Twitter's limit was 140 characters because that was the maximum SMS limit.
And then the iPhone happened.
Social networks moved from web-based sites that offered an inferior experience on mobile to app-based. People no longer had to sneak a look at Facebook during office hours, they could browse on their phone.
Connections could be added the moment you met them. Anybody could join. And anybody’s activity could be tracked any time of the day.
Community still played a big part at this point, hence why community manager became a role. Suddenly the hardcore fans could meet more hardcore fans and casual fans than ever before. Global fanbases could find each other, without needing to adhere to forum rules.
Instagram's initial road to growth was built around communities. Pinterest wasn't quite community based, but still played on idea exchanges. Tumblr was a language in and of itself. Gaming and esport communities were a natural bedfellow for YouTube. Dual screening - Tweeting through reality shows - made TV more entertaining.
All supercharged by a device that made engagement with the rest of the world easy.
Communities gave way to interests and other data points. Data points meant the ability to target more relevant content to people. And data points plus the scale and reach of the genuinely global networks meant advertising.
That shifted the networks' priorities a little, as the focus turned to ad revenue over users, which in turn led to decisions to keep more people engaging on the networks for longer, which then moved to algorithms.
And algorithms were a necessity, because chronological posts weren't keeping people engaged, but larger friend networks also meant the items that were genuinely relevant or interesting were getting buried.
Algorithms were one jump, although at first they didn't fundamentally change Social 2.0, which was community built on scale, funded by advertising.
The other jump was Snapchat, which was probably the only truly Social 2.5 company built around a slightly different approach to one feature of the phone: its camera.
Snapchat is also probably the closest social network today to the Social 1.0 era, which may also explain why it’s struggled to scale with advertisers.
Snapchat has a significant footprint in the evolution of social by defaulting to 9:16 as a default visual ratio. And unlike almost every other feature, Stories did not work on desktop devices.
Stories were a mobile feature for a mobile audience. But they still were (just) social insofar as they still led to two way interactions, albeit often conducted in private messaging.
But if Social 1.0 was communities and Social 2.0 was two way conversations, then Social 3.0 is either a one-way broadcast or upgraded versions of communities.But it would be hard to call social media “social” in the same way that versions 1.0 and 2.0 were social.
Social 3.0: not social and nearly social
Facebook will now be turning their newsfeed into a version of TikTok. Instagram is already some of the way there. And TikTok’s algorithm is very clever in that it keeps you watching.
TikTok is also as big a threat to TV as it is to legacy social. But while it has social elements, the overall goal is to broadcast each clip to as wide an audience as possible.
Instagram, meanwhile, attempts to do the same. Facebook has decided that showing you want to watch will be better for its bottom line than commenting on an old high school friend’s status. Twitter long ago ceased to be a social network and is more akin to a digital megaphone on the internet equivalent of Speakers' Corner.
The big social networks are now broadcasters first, and social second. Assuming any of these networks can successfully emulate WeChat's shopping functionality, then commerce will come second. Media specialists long ago stopped asking 'how can we make this go viral' and centred discussion around CPMs, CTRs and CPAs instead.
The objective on social media hasn't been engagement for some time now: it's either reach or sales. Bottom-of-funnel adverts are the digital equivalent of point of sale, while Instagram and Pinterest are closer to shopping channels than social networks.
The conversations around today's social networks are, with the exception of disinformation, much closer to conversations about traditional media than they are social media.
Creator funds, say, are network talent deals by another name. Facebook's attempt to muscle in on gaming streaming by signing an exclusive deal with Twitch streamer Ninja is the social equivalent to ITV briefly poaching Des Lynam from the BBC.
The bigger players have largely evolved beyond social and it's left to newer companies such as Discord to lean into the original Web 1.0 forum elements, while BeReal and Dispo trade off nostalgia for a lost earlier kind of social media and a tighter network (I remain to be convinced that BeReal will be able to scale profitably as it is, but it'll be fun while it lasts).
It took Social 2.0 several years before it finally defined itself, the same is true of Social 3.0. Is it decentralised or highly centralised? Is the aim for the user to passive consume content or actively get involved in a conversation? Is it about close connections or as large an audience as possible?
These are as much sociological questions as they are social media questions, just as Meta's attempt to copy TikTok are business strategy questions rather than social media questions.
TikTok has always been broadcast and entertainment first with social and community elements built in, which makes YouTube a more natural competitor than Meta.
It's also understandable why Meta doesn't see its future in community. Discord and Reddit are growing but Discord's subscriptions only turn the company a modest profit.
But Reddit only recently hit $100m in ad revenue in a quarter, compared to the $28bn Facebook made in the same quarter. TikTok, meanwhile, is on track to make $12bn from advertising.
This isn't to say that there isn't a viable business model in community Social 3.0 but whether it scales is another question. The more users, the less the sense of community, but communities have a natural ceiling, as do friends and family.
It's why LinkedIn - professional development and networking - works better than Twitter and why the 1.8bn people who use Facebook Groups are useful for ad targeting but less easy for direct monetisation.
WhatsApp is a simple and effective messaging tool - and one a lot of small businesses have embraced - but Meta has struggled historically to make money from it. Recent moves suggest they may view B2B as a better revenue strategy for WhatsApp.
The End Is The Beginning Is The End
Meta's move to TikTok-ify Facebook's home screen and move to broadcast first - as it's already done with Instagram - signals a move away from Social 2.0, even if strategically it seems somewhat questionable.
Facebook had previously complemented TV and SVOD, now, like TikTok, it's in much more direct competition, both for eyeballs and media spend at exactly the same time that Netflix and Disney+ also enter the ad dollar market, while YouTube is made for Connected TVs in a way that Facebook isn't.
Meanwhile, the move to niche has been coming for some time. While lumping generations together is generally not good practice, Gen Z do seem to be refining where they're prepared to broadcast to a wide audience and where they want to just be social with other people with common interests.
But back to the original question: how do you define social media? The short answer is not like we did a decade ago. Engagement on bigger social channels is less important than it's ever been (assuming it was important in the first place), while the more social elements of 'social' takes place behind closed doors and is harder to track.
Tomorrow's social media manager may have very different job titles.
Interesting reads
The last man standing in the floppy disk business
Technology doesn’t really die, it just becomes less used. Large legacy systems built on today’s top of the range specs will require niche near-obsolete technology to keep running tomorrow. Behind that are people like Tom Persky, who make a very good living from legacy tech that very few people still use. LINK.
Snapchat’s limitations catch up with it
I’ve always quite liked Snapchat’s determination to be at bit different and their product team is far more innovative than, say, Twitter. But as a media business they’re stuck in an uncomfortable place where they’re too big to be niche but too niche to scale. Their core userbase isn’t exactly top of the disposable income list either and it’s not exactly clear where they move to next. LINK.
Will interest rates gut the media market?
Plenty of countries and industries are getting lessons in basic economics right now (although that doesn’t seem to have extended to the UK government). It also gets to the core of what marketers should be looking at: the balance sheet. Growth is only really valuable to a business if it’s accompanied by profitability - or at least a clear path to profitability and venture capital cash is going to move towards the latter. That has a knock-on effect on media spend. LINK.
Nikeland and “success” in the metaverse
Walmart unveiled Walmartland in Roblox this week. I’ll leave it to others to critique this particular execution, but it’s worth looking at Nike, who are one of the few brands with a strategic rationale and a logical brand alignment with gaming. Nike may be used as a success but they’ve spent a lot of money to do so (more than your average brand), are very much an outlier, and:
“We also don’t know just how much of this is tied to Roblox’s own user growth, which has exploded from 16M in 2019 to 54M in 2022 — it could very well track that new players entering Roblox are naturally curious and want to dick about in Nikeland but really don’t have much brand affinity with them before and there’s no way to track if they do when they leave either.”
Read the whole piece. It’s a good counter argument to anybody who uses Nike as an example of why your brand should be in the metaverse gaming. LINK.
Thanks for sticking with The Dispash during the quiet period. Hopefully you’ve found our return mildly diverting. Like what you’ve read? Forward it onto somebody and ask them to subscribe.
Playing us out this week, a live version of the B52s Rock Lobster. Even in 2022, this is still a deeply weird and deeply brilliant track that in the normal scheme of things would have been a John Peel favourite yet somehow launched the career of the band. I honestly can’t imagine what it would have been like watching this for the first time in the 70s.