Op-Ed: Social media — Full of itself, failing to deliver in too many ways

This photo illustration shows the social media platform X (former Twitter) app on a smartphone in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on September 18, 2024 – Copyright AFP/File Allison Joyce

Social media was going to connect the world. It was going to be a way for people from anywhere and everywhere to engage. “Everyone is connected”, etc.

That worked out well, didn’t it?

The mythology of social media makes even US media look almost focused and respectable. It’s self-hype to infinity.

The hype is pretty messy, too. Glitz, glamour, maybe, if you’re 10 years old. You have the infant influencers and rabid rabbits making millions. So what? A few industry pets aren’t all that relatable. The actual successes aren’t many people. It’s another 1%, as usual.

That’s the problem. What social media thinks of itself vs what it actually delivers. The ridiculous vs an ever-diminishing content value.   

I bumped into a Forbes article “Why social media is the most misunderstood job in corporate America”. I had to see how social media could be misunderstood, even by a sector that famously drags its eyebrows along the ground for a living.

Social media is ironically called “the attention economy”, even in a country where ADHD is a sort of cultural icon.

It WAS different. Twitter was a primary source of news, and Tweet volumes meant something. That’s not the case now. Nobody gives a damn what a bot thinks about anything. Social media bots are fiction by definition. AI bots aren’t going to make things any better. You’d be lucky to get real numbers for marketing.

That’s not a problem in the sector.

“We reached 200 million people!”

Well, did you? Any social media demographic has a percentile of social media watchers. In the States, at least half of your audience is hostile to some degree thanks to the tides of political slop. Another hefty percentage of viewers are the people who posted it and their handlers. It’s not even a real audience in that many ways.

You could create a nice cynical algorithmic metric to measure hits as a form of market antagonism. The market, as usual, sees what it wants to see, not what it needs to see.

Well, you could get decent metrics if anyone could be bothered responding to the tonnage of tripe produced every second. Total silence is a negative response.

Imagery has a lot to do with this silent response. Nobody watches social media to find the babbling bozos of their dreams. Bear in mind also that these corporate guys also can’t read their own marketing figures.

Check out this Top Social Media Marketing Skills article, complete with an embarrassingly edited headline. Then see if you can say you’ve noticed any of those skills on social media. This is the image social media has of itself. “Pathetic” is hardly the word.

It becomes this in business terms:

“We spent $10 million on a social media marketing campaign” translates into a few extra sales worth maybe $1 million. They don’t see it and don’t look for it. There are obviously no business skills involved at any level.

TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are the mainstream market. They’re shopfronts as much or more than social media. They deliver consumables, not information There’s a huge difference. These are the lands of FOMO and the rest of the superficial rubbish on social media.

YouTube is a bit different. It provides content people like, and those people tend to be niche markets. The quality of content varies from undeniably excellent to utter trash. The audience soon learns to discriminate. That’s pretty much the whole story.

I was watching a live CNN coverage of the LA fires. The chat was entirely political, and nobody bothered to respond. There were posts celebrating the fires from around the world.

News?

Useful information?

Hardly. It was a soapbox based on a catastrophe. Do you think that sells or influences anyone? It doesn’t. It wasn’t even a new platform for the nuts; it had nothing to say and went on saying it for the entire CNN coverage.

That’s the dry rot destroying social media. You can’t “engage” with this drivel. It has no value. It’s just noise.

That’s where social media becomes its own worst and most unforgiving enemy. Nobody’s interested in non-information.

The lack of hard or even slightly useful information just isn’t good enough anymore. You can find drivel anywhere; why go looking for it?

There’s a major productivity issue here. Yes, you are allowed to laugh like an enthusiastic hyena.

How productive can this slop be for anyone?

Now add another dimension – Real users who want to communicate with each other. Remember them? Your actual core users who keep your numbers up?

These users can take or leave anything, however insane, and they do.  They can ignore anything and be unimpressed by anything. You guys should be thankful you can even point to a meaningful market demographic like that.

The refugees from X and the resulting meltdown are a warning. The advertisers didn’t like it. They left The real users didn’t like it. They left. That’s what non-delivery means for social media.

Nobody HAS to watch anything online.

You’re a click away from oblivion.

______________________________________________________

Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.