Yesterday my boyfriend was complaining about Facebook before I’d been awake ten minutes.
He usually lets me read Morning Spoilers on io9 before he reports on the fresh technology hells of the day. He was irate that Facebook was announcing Instagram for Video. “Who would want to make a 15 second video?” he asked. “uh, maybe 13 million Vine users?” I mumbled. “Or…. not?”
He wasn’t familiar with Twitter’s 6-second video shoot-edit-share app Vine, although he knew about Facebook’s purchase of Instagram because of the Instagram Suicide Note. He was just mad that Facebook was launching another stupid social app.
I wouldn’t be familiar with Vine if I wasn’t in Marketing, because after five years on Twitter I stopped using it about a year ago. My boyfriend shut down his Facebook account a year ago; I use mine only for event invites since Graph Search was introduced. He got rid of his Android phone and bought a $20, ten-year-old Razr on eBay last month. Now he can’t check email or Twitter when we’re out. We have social media fatigue.
Is account deletion the new adoption?
Is it possible that Present Shock is driving tech-savvy urban professionals in the Bay Area, traditionally the leading wedge of early adoption, to resist new technology? Or are we just among the outliers who are fed up with social and the unending drama of monetizing social? It’s my job to know how social monetization is developing; that doesn’t mean I have to be a statistic.
If you were an early adopter of a free service, you either get to see it ganked or watch it try out various forms of advertising on you, the captive audience.
Lots of business owners are fed up with Facebook, because of Edgerank changes and pay-to-play. If you’re being unnerved by the ways Facebook is using you as a platform for its advertisers, here are 6 Reasons to Delete Facebook.
However, maybe Facebook is serving you well, with ads that occasionally interest you. If the Facebook algorithms deliver you consumer opportunities that add value, the way being a non-anonymized Google search user and in the filter bubble does for me, then that’s a fine thing.
Facebook is just especially egregious because they’re in their awkward teenage monetization years. Bradley Horowitz is throwing shade a little soon, given the way that Google is constantly declaring Glass will have no ads- for now. We all know perfectly well Glass will not be just a gather-data-for-Google’s advertisers platform– it’ll be a serve-ads-based-on-that-data-back-at-ya platform.
Will my desire to cyber-convert override my horror at having stuff sold directly to my eyeballs? Prolly. Will becoming a cyborg pull me back to social? Maybe, because of distributed mechanical telepathy. But I think I’m gone from Facebook for good, in my personal life. And “social media fatigue” is officially a trend.
What does this mean for marketers, who have made a global shift to pushing the creation of quality, shareable content as the best way to surface your brand? Is content marketing dead?
The results of the Pew survey show that 61% of surveyed Facebook users say that they have taken a break from the social network for several weeks or more at a time. Furthermore, the study shows that social media fatigue is not a passing phenomenon, as 38% of users plan using Facebook less in the coming year. However, social media fatigue transcends Facebook alone, and is of real concern in an era of content-targeted marketing. –Angie Picardo
Content marketing isn’t going anywhere.
Released May 22, Google’s search update Penguin 2.0 (aka Penguin 4) is “gauging you on a social engagement level“. While Google’s preferential treatment of shared content is still increasing, Facebook is not the only place you can get shared. Google+ isn’t going away (for now); it serves your business to get engaged in Google’s little playpen.
Pinterest is rocket fuel for stuff– if your business is in a Pinterest-friendly vertical like fashion, get all over that and get your descriptions loaded. And make your pictures gorgeous. On a visual site created for aspirational archiving, the pretty product pictures win.
Social favor and response of your website. The amount of times your website is shared, repeatedly visited, and talked about online—the newest Penguin is smarter than ever at discovering this and ranking you based on these factors. What’s big in social? You’d better get on Google +, if you weren’t before. Pinterest gets crawled, so if you pin, be sure to optimize your descriptions. Tweets use “hashtags” like SEO keywords, so don’t forget those.- Julia Spence
Don’t forget white papers and press releases. If you’re an expert in a niche, downloadable white papers from your smart folks are golden. Get your team active as valued commenters on industry sites.
Make your LinkedIn page sexy. People don’t talk about it much, but LinkedIn is always trying to add new bells and whistles for businesses. You can comment and Like as your company now. There’s at-a-glance engagement measurement for every post.
In Larry Brooks’ 2009 post “Why Content is No Longer King, And Who’s Taking His Place”, he makes the case for Context as the best tool that marketers have. In 2013, context is vastly evolved. Context is all about where your customers see your content and how it feels to them to see it there. And that’s plain, old-fashioned social media engagement metrics.
In today’s content marketing ecosystem, you can use powerful social measurement tools to gauge where your content is getting a good response and where they’ve rolled up the welcome mat. You can tailor your content to the social sphere it’s destined for, so that people with social media fatigue see the kind of story that actually interests them.
Does it sound like a lot of work? Maybe, but having a paste-up department that used Letraset to make ads for newspapers that were thrown away after one day was a lot of work too.
The big guns in your company’s arsenal today are awareness and adaptability. One story you’ll want to follow is the damn 16-second video app, because Forbes thinks video on Instagram could supercharge Facebook’s advertising growth. People might be all over it!
To keep your awareness current and your social options open, follow the stats of who’s using what. The infographic below by Craig Smith on “How Many People Use the Top Social Media and Apps” is now being updated with a monthly post. It’s worth a scroll down as the numbers are mindblowing. And you can tweet the stats!
(Also, like we said, get on Pinterest if you sell stuff. Read Smith’s amazing Pinterest stats here.)
This post originally appeared on the T324 blog.