A basic law of gravity says that what goes up must come down and I suppose those laws apply to social sites as well. Witness MySpace, Zynga, and others. Now I don’t believe that social media is going anywhere. It’s become too important a communications channel and too ingrained into people’s lives. However, I do think that which social sites are the focus of social activity will continue to be an ever-changing landscape, particularly among the young and among early adopters.
I see far less activity on Facebook from my younger friends (by young I mean under 30 and under 25 in a number of cases) than I do on Instagram, Twitter, Vine, and other places. You might have heard about the Piper Jaffray report stating, as TechCrunch reported,
that interest in Facebook seems to be declining heavily among teens. Though teens still dub Facebook their most important social network, Piper Jaffray reports that the numbers are down regarding how many teens see Facebook as the most important social media website.
What it more interesting to me is the report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that found that even though 94 percent of teenage social media users still have Facebook, more and more are jumping ship to Twitter and Instagram because of what Pew found as “increasing adult presence, people sharing excessively, and stressful ‘drama.’”
Then there are brands who are trying to tap into that audience. As usual, marketers tend to be their own worst enemies:
Retailers that push fewer posts, but better and more targeted ones, are gaining an edge over those that pursue volume when it comes to publishing Facebook content, new data suggests.
The 50 Social Retail Report from enterprise social media management company Expion analyzed 16,000 posts for the top 50 retail brands as designated by Interbrand. It found that as a whole, fan engagement and volume decreased for retail brands on Facebook, despite their increases in published posts – implying a need for more thoughtful earned and paid media strategies on the platform.
As we’ve discussed before, there really is something to be gained from listening and engaging rather than yelling and spamming. Quality is demonstrably better than quantity.
All these reports tie together in my mind. No matter how big a social site is, there are those who become bored and who move on to the next thing. It’s like the old Yogi Berra quote about a place being too popular so no one goes there anymore. Kids don’t want to be hanging out in cyberspace with their parents (or teachers or old guys like me!). They don’t want to be deluged by massive amounts of marketing jetsam. Is Facebook dying? No. But if you’re putting your marketing eggs in that basket in an attempt to reach the younger demo, you might be.
Thoughts?
Consult Keith 
Comments
One of the best things about digital media is that it’s an open platform.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Anyone can plug in and begin producing content or commenting on content that others have posted. Often those comments can be an interesting or insightful as the original article. They can also serve to provide balance when a “news” piece strays too far from the facts. I like reading comments most of the time and I appreciate those of you who take the time to add your thinking to mine here on the screed.
Unfortunately, there are those who use the ability to piggyback on the audiences good content attracts for other purposes. Here alone, spammers post dozens of fake comments with links back to their crap every day (WordPress has a built-in spam block that works exceptionally well). Elsewhere, trolls try to take over conversations, so the comments become a soapbox for rants against one party or politician or another no matter what the subject matter of the original story. It’s not just blog or news sites that suffer this – think about your own friends on Facebook or Twitter – seen any flame wars?
There are softwares that do moderation but they lack nuance and Im’ not sure they can fact-check a politely written bit of utter nonsense. Research has shown that an environment filled with negative comments can influence readers’ perceptions of the underlying subject matter negatively even when the piece is very neutral. What does one do? It’s not an easy answer. When we grappled with this issue many years ago as commenting became common, the solution my team went with involved, committed community members on a sort of neighborhood watch. We enabled certain folks who made insightful comments to alert us to issues and eventually even allowed some of them to block and edit to keep a safe, sane environment.
I think that’s about all we can do and still remain transparent while fostering conversation. People will have issues with your product or service and sometimes they’ll be very loud about their displeasure if it’s unwarranted. There’s not much one can do when that negativity is expressed via social shares that aren’t on your page but for the places under your control, encouraging polite, factual discourse can be a boost to readership as well as to your credibility and authenticity. That’s what I try to do here and what I try to get my clients to do as well. What do you do? Please comment (gulp!).
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