Spotting the Next Major Social Media Trend
SOCIAL MEDIA IS CHANGING, BUT THAT’S NOTHING NEW
If it feels like the very foundations of social media marketing are shifting beneath your feet, it’s probably because you’re right.
While the major channels continue to grow, activity on the newsfeeds is down, and people are finding more group-chat-style ways to share information, which is calling into question a lot of the “best practices” that brands have adopted over the past few years. But maybe that’s the problem. Maybe the ways that people interact with content, and the media that they use, is always shifting, and our attempts to codify social media into an easy-to-follow set of ideas was just never going to work in the first place.
Let me give a quick example: Back in the mid-2010s, brands became obsessed with customer service and engagement on Twitter. Beginning with Morton’s Steakhouse, then Oreo, and I’m sure that we all remember Wendy’s Twitter account, millions of dollars were spent trying to come up with ways to connect with people through cleverly written copy.
Then, just as abruptly, we entered into the visual era. Led by brand phenomena like Glossier, Airbnb, and Warby Parker, the hot new thing became the perfectly-curated and creatively-designed IG feed, complete with clever ways to integrate User-Generated Content.
Most recently — to skip ahead several chapters — every social media manager’s job became short-form video. Their content had to be catchy and “viral,” and work across Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok.
The problem is not that social media keeps shifting, it’s that we think that it ever stands still.
Every day there is an incredibly talented new creator thinking differently about the ways a medium can be used that’s going to inspire others to follow along, which will create more iterations and spinoffs.
Now, I don’t pretend have an easy answer for how to lean into this ever-changing landscape, but I do think that one of the most useful things we can do is to look back in order to look forward.
By seeing where we are today in the context of all of the major shifts that have, and will continue to happen, perhaps we can gain just a bit more clarity into how we might position our brands to ride the next wave.
The following list is paraphrased from a recent piece by Hubspot called The History of Social Media Since 2023, along with my own thoughts added in.
1971 — Ray Tomlinson sent the first email, marking the birth of modern electronic mail
The next time you read a headline that says “Email is over,” remember that it is the most enduring form of digital media
1985 — America Online (AOL) is founded, which adds messaging to the digital media mix
1997 — Six Degrees launches, which is arguably the first proper “social media” platform because it combined profiles with messaging
1999 — Livejournal adds what we would later call “blogging”
In those days it was called a “web-log,” before being shortened to “blog,” which really isn’t much better
1999-2000 — THE FIRST DOT-COM CRASH
2000-2003 — “See, the Internet was a fad; glad that’s over” – pretty much everyone
2003 — LinkedIn is launched as a way to post your resume online
This could be seen as the moment when business entered social media in a meaningful way
2003 — Myspace brings with it customizable profiles, which prompts many of us to teach ourselves html so we can show off to our new “friends”
2004 — Facebook is founded, largely to help college kids check each others’ relationship statuses
2005 — YouTube makes it possible to upload video footage to the internet
2005 — Reddit gives us all “the front page of the Internet” where we can share links, because there is really no good way to discover interesting content
2006 — Twitter’s @Jack hits send on “just setting up my twttr,” which was built to push status updates about parties to friends’ phones, and will eventually be used by global leaders to set public policy
2008 — DOT-COM CRASH PART 2
2008-2010 — “Ok, this time the internet is really over” – the same people
2010 — Pinterest makes social media much more visual with its shareable boards
2010-2011 — Instagram and Snapchat mark the shift to mobile as the first major mobile-only social platforms
2011 — Google+ proves that social media is hard, by gaining huge early adoption and then failing spectacularly
2011 — Twitch launches as a literal first-person live stream then quickly gets adopted by the gaming community
2012 — Facebook buys Instagram for $1Billion
The headlines call Zuckerberg an idiot, which is certainly not the first, or last, time headlines are wildly incorrect
2012 — Twitter buys Vine, pre-launch
Spoiler: This one doesn’t go quite as well as the IG acquisition
2013 — Vine is launched, which introduces the idea of short video content that anyone can create
2017-2018 — TikTok becomes available in the United States; acquires Musical.ly, a niche lip-syncing app
Basically no one can see what’s coming (except maybe GaryVee)
2020 — Clubhouse and BeReal leverage our time spent at home to capture attention and create new types of connection
Once we’re back out in the world again, both tank pretty quickly
2023 — Twitter is acquired, hate speech skyrockets, advertisers leave, user numbers drop dramatically, and apparently it’s going to take over the banking system somehow(?)
2023 — Decentralized social media channels gain some momentum in the form of Mastadon and Bluesky
The promise is exciting, but the follow-through isn’t there yet
2023 — Meta launches Threads as an alternative to Twitter and becomes the fastest-growing anything, ever, in the history of media
So where does all of that leave us?
Today’s social media landscape is as fragmented as it’s ever been, but perhaps that’s the way it was always going to go.
Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, and Twitter just happened to emerge as the most popular platforms out of many others, and we all gathered there as we got used to this idea of sharing and connecting online.
The question that all of us should be asking ourselves is: What seems so obvious and significant to us right now that may actually just be a fleeting trend? Answering that question will help us determine the difference between trying to catch a wave of popularity on a new app like Vine or Clubhouse, vs. building an enduring business that uses these tools to our advantage.
THINKING ABOUT PODCAST ADVERTISING?
IT’S PROBABLY A GOOD IDEA
Podcasts can be a tough one to wrap our arms around. It’s not obvious how we buy the ads, and there’s no direct click, which means that conversion tracking is much more difficult. Yet a recent study by Integral Ad Science shows that they’re some of the best performing ads out there right now.
A few of those numbers:
More than three-quarters (81%) of internet users in the US have listened to digital audio in the past year, primarily on Spotify and YouTube.
Of those listeners, 63% have interacted with audio ads in the past 12 months, 28% have visited a store or website as a result, and 20% have actually made a purchase.
Host-read podcast ads were most effective at driving purchases, per the report, but not by much more than pre-recorded, audio-only ads.
The cherry on top is that Spotify and others are making the ad buying process almost as easy as it is to buy Facebook ads.
If you’re going to spending more than a couple thousand dollars on ads in 2024, and your audience is in any way connected to podcasts, it may be a good investment to consider.
Read Marketing Brew’s analysis and download the report for yourself here
GREAT ADS FIND THEIR AUDIENCES
EVEN ADVERTISING BENEFITS FROM A CONTENT-FIRST STRATEGY
Recently we’ve been writing a lot about how it no longer makes sense to have channel-specific content plans that set out to hack our way to large, engaged audiences. Instead, the most successful brands are creating the type of content that people want to share, and then that content finds its audience both through sharing, and through the incredibly intelligent algorithms.
The same is (apparently) true of advertising right now. According to well-respected ad writer Jon Loomer, AI tools like Meta’s Advantage+ have become so good at what they do that it no longer makes sense to create hyper-targeted creative for hyper-niche audiences.
Instead, the best ads start with content that a segment of people legitimately love, and AI/algorithms are smart enough to find those people and serve them ads.
This is great news for those of us who have big ambitions, and small budgets. It’s not so great news for media buyers who charge by the hour.
REMEMBER THREADS?
DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK
When Meta’s answer to Twitter launched, it grew to 100 million users in about 5 days – the quickest anything has ever done so.
Then, just as quickly, it seems that most of us got bored and moved onto the next thing. But now it seems that at least some of those people may be coming back in a significant way.
In an entirely anecdotal — and somewhat navel-gazing — study, a Boston Globe reporter analyzed four media brand accounts and determined that they were getting greater engagement on Threads, despite dramatically smaller audiences. Meanwhile, many users have been reporting that they’re seeing a significant uptick in follower growth and content clicks over the past couple of weeks.
Maybe it just took us a while to get used to Threads, maybe the flood of recent tragic news has driven more people back to their feeds, or maybe we all took one last peek back at whatever Twitter has become and decided to close that chapter for good.
Regardless of the cause, it seems that Threads is having a comeback moment, and if you’ve been longing for a place to share your thoughts with the world via a stream of (mostly) text-based consciousness, then it might be time to take another look at Threads.
Read the analysis by @mkarolian about Threads, on Threads
A FEW MORE STORIES WORTH A CLICK
STUFF THAT WILL MAKE YOU JUST A BIT SMARTER THIS WEEK
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A HubSpot writer asked the question: Which AI tool actually writes the best copy? She tested a bunch and shared her results (caveat: obviously her employer’s tool came out on top, but it’s still a worthwhile read)
Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting
