Social media is broken, and it's our fault

Fifteen years. 

That’s how much time I have spent on Twitter. It feels funny and sad to say that in light of what’s happening over there with an unstable egomaniac at the wheel. 

I used to be a very active Twitter user. Twitter was my top source for acquiring new business. I grew an audience by sharing blog content, writing quippy tweets, and trying to be a helpful human. It introduced me to some of my closest friends.

Fifteen years later, I’ve gotten older and busier, while Twitter is noisier and more unhinged. If I were building a brand today, it wouldn't be my primary platform.

 💡 Fear not; this letter isn’t about Twitter. It’s about the evolution of audiences and how marketers can adapt to trends to create new habits that serve us all better. 

 (It’s also a little bit about how the demise of social networks might be your fault.) 

 Goodbye, Town Square. Hello, 1:1 Conversation.

Early Twitter was special. You didn’t need to be a Cool Kid or hold specialized skills and knowledge to join. You could meet anyone instantly. The CEO whose email you couldn’t access was waiting on Twitter to chat with you about their favorite TV show. You might have even logged on to watch it together.

• For consumers, Twitter was our town square. It was an equalizer and a constant source of serendipitous conversation. 
• For marketers, it was where you showed up to be seen by a mass audience. Like being on television when television had four channels.   

The demise of Twitter feels like a shift away from that easy discovery. A move from open networks to private communities. We don’t StumbleUpon things anymore. We set up Discord servers or whatever people are doing on Mastodon.

 As a consumer, this makes me a little melancholy. It was joyful to peek into strangers’ conversations simply by following a hashtag. You found new voices, brands, content, and a shared connection you would have otherwise missed. It was easy. 

 What does this shift mean for marketers? 

• Follow your audience: If we move from a public water cooler to a more fragmented, privatized landscape, your brand can’t live everywhere. Find the networks that house your ideal audience and invest there. That requires research to understand who your best customers are, where they spend their time, and how they consume information. It takes more knowledge, but it also means an ability to focus on a specific group vs. blasting out general messages.
• Adapt your participation strategy: Rethink your engagement strategy to identify how their new hangouts integrate into your marketing plan. How will you participate in these smaller groups? You might become a content creator on each new platform (though that takes hefty resources). Maybe you’ll work with the platform- or topic-specific influencers to gain awareness at a lighter load. Or perhaps you’ll decide to advertise on a larger number of outlets or create sponsored content rather than build an organic presence. Maybe you'll turn disruptive. 

As your audience moves out of public view, where are they going? And how will you reach them in an interactive and beneficial way?

 Reassessing What You Own

Is part of me kicking myself that I’ve spent 15 years acquiring an audience of 35,000+ eyes for Elon Musk to shoot it all up to space in a matter of weeks? 

Maybe. How many NYT bestsellers could I have written instead of thousands and thousands (and thousands) of tweets? (Probably none.)

We’ve already discussed the mother-zucker dangers of renting vs. owning your presence. If it’s not your site, it’s not your audience. 

Yet, watching that audience potentially go up in smoke this week serves as an excellent reminder to take stock of your marketing mix.

• What content are you creating?
• Where are you building a satellite presence?
• How well does that presence point back to your home base? 

Directing people to a place you fully control is the point of social media. The goal was never to amass one million YouTube subscribers or to have the biggest Facebook group. It was to get those people back to your main properties. Your social media strategy should include a plan for how you do that.

Releasing the Fetish of Habits

Habits are not needs. I lifted that line from Seth Godin, and it feels especially appropriate here. 

It’s easy to think that because we spent the past 5, 10, or 15 years doing something, it’s essential to keep doing it. 

💡 See also: The Sunk Cost Fallacy. 

Just because you’ve previously invested in content marketing or a specific digital advertising channel doesn’t necessarily mean you should keep investing in them. 

Trends evolve. New tactics become more effective. Audience behavior changes. 

As a new year approaches, it’s an excellent time to assess the following:

• 🔴 What will you stop? What is no longer serving you, your business, or your audience? What non-helpful activity can you stop to free up time somewhere else?  
• ✅ What will you start? What do you need to start doing to ensure 2023 is your best year of business yet? What opportunities are you missing that you can begin to leverage?
• 🏁 What will you accelerate? What activities are working that you should do more of? What has generated momentum or gained favor with your team?

Don’t knee-jerk just because the waters get rough. Waters get rough; that's what they do. Abandoning a channel because it’s changed makes as much sense as staying on that channel because it’s a habit. Know why you’re making specific choices and how they align with your business. 

Admitting This Is (Maybe) Our Fault

I’m sad about the end of Twitter. Not because of a follower count or a lost marketing channel but because Twitter was once a community of connections and conversation. 

And what’s happening on Twitter--the complete downfall of it--is happening across social media. 

Social media networks feel horrible today, don’t they? It used to be fun, but now we’re watching people we care about misbehaving, and it feels like, hey, why are we all still doing this? 

We could use a dollop of self-awareness that some of this is our fault.  

When you created your Facebook account for the first time, the opportunity to reconnect with real people you lost contact with from your real life felt revolutionary. And then Twitter came along, doubling down on social media's value and giving us a global town square to learn about new topics and meet new experts. It opened all sorts of doors for connection and group learning. 

And then, we had a choice when we started using social media for business. 

•  Use it to make your organization more competent and more human. 
• Use it to become super-focused on slick campaigns, viral videos, and ROI.

 Ten years ago, I wrote this:

  Now, here we are.

Too many of us didn’t take the opportunity to use social media to transform how we were doing business. We used it to track and stalk and eavesdrop on customers in ways that were unbeneficial to them.

Now, we’re on a sinking ship without much to show for it. And we're using new tactics like email and marketing personalization in the same broken way, getting the same results. 

Wherever you go next, whatever marketing channel you move to or the new community you set up, you can make a new choice in how you use it. To make your presence so valuable, you create a socially-connected company that’s not tied to a single platform. To use the data you're collecting to improve your business, not just to fuel more predatory marketing. 

• You can be social AND valuable. 
• You can listen to your customers AND improve. 

 Fifteen years ago, much of this social media stuff was new. We didn't fully know what we were doing. Now we do. 

 Next time, let’s make good choices.