Time to shake up your social media?
Preamble
I ended up writing quite a lot about the impact of AI last year, more through necessity rather than by design. In one post I came up with the pithy-if-somewhat-limited call to action fix your broken UI before you build your shiny AI. In it I listed out a few areas where I felt organisations might benefit from focusing their time and energy instead of getting overly distracted by the shaky promise of AI.
I was loosely targeting the sectors I know best – public sector, not-for-profit, and arts & culture – but it might be useful elsewhere too.
This is my first attempt at diving deeper into a specific topic. Hashtags at the ready, this post's about social media.
Everything Everywhere All At Once
It’s somehow fitting to discover there’s an unresolved argument about who first coined the term social media, a medium where unresolved arguments are effectively the raison d'être.
As a phrase, 'social media' has become so ubiquitous it seems to apply to any website that isn’t just, well, a website. Wikipedia bundles a whole assortment of different genres under the term, but the generally accepted view is that social media applies to a site, app, or function where there’s an interactive, user-generated purpose.
In its early days social media was enthusiastically embraced as a way to collaborate, engage, and build a community with your audience. What started as a noisy rabble of different sites and services began to standardise around the end of the noughties as a clutch of dominant players took hold.
Years later those same players – Meta, Google, Microsoft and Twitter/X – still control the social media most organisations throw their resources behind.
Just for fun, pick any website (retail, leisure, government, knock yourself out!), scroll down to the foot of the page and see what social icons or links are on display.
With the exception of TikTok, I'd predict you'll find an aging gang that includes Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and X (it's clearly too much of a wrench for some to swap out the old Twitter birdie logo). Sure, there may be the occasional quirky Pinterest or Flickr link, but those are the exception rather than the rule.
And now ask yourself why. Why those links? Why those channels? Why put the resource and effort into nurturing and maintaining them? Why always the footer? Why why why?
Origins story
I started in a new role midway through 2009, which turns out was a really useful marker in terms of social media coming-of-age.
The previous organisation I'd worked for was all over early social media like a problematic rash: experimenting with different channels, throwing up accounts left, right and centre, trialing both paid and organic activity.
A lot of this was properly exciting and groundbreaking, but I was already getting the sense of something that needed management and a bit of sensible centralised control – we were making far too many assumptions about our audiences' wants and needs, and there was no collective view of what we were trying to achieve.
When I moved onto my next job I was surprised to find that the cat was still firmly in the bag, and I went from trying to monitor hundreds of rogue accounts to maintaining the grand total of zero social channels. This presented an opportunity to do things more strategically, but also involved a lot of cajoling to persuade others that social media wasn't just some frivolous sideshow.
Thankfully even in 2009 there was already some good, solid advice available. I'd become hooked on Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff's Groundswell, which provided some uber-sensible frameworks for planning and executing a social media strategy.
There was a lot of useful published analysis on the back of Barack Obama's 2008 election victory – arguably the first truly digital political campaign.
And Neil Williams, then at the UK Government's Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy, and subsequently Gov.uk and the BFI, published his Twitter Strategy for Government Departments online.
This in particular was hugely influential – being able to point at a document that showed how government was getting its head around social media lent substantial oomph to my own argument. It wasn't simply something that could be ignored or relegated to an intern, social media was becoming a core part of our communications, our digital presence, and our brand.
So my team and I got to work on some documentation that laid out our position and objectives. These were short, clear, and common sense: dos and don'ts, managing risk, oversight of accounts, scheduling content, results analysis, etc, etc. Like Neil's document, they still carry weight – most of the third-party websites they reference may have fallen by the wayside, but the core principles remain solid.
However, no matter how well those materials hold out, there's no denying they were written a loooonnng time ago.
Fifteen years of failing fast
I wonder how much has really changed in that period. Obviously lots has actually changed IRL: platforms have come and gone, trends have evolved, everyone pivoted to video based on made-up metrics, hashtags became omnipresent for a while, Snap and then TikTok rewrote the rules of engagement.
But when I look around at how organisations are making use of social tools and tech, I get the impression that a lot of that early documentation, those now ancient playbooks, are still the foundation for much social activity.
For all the rhetoric of 'failing fast' and 'continuous improvement' it feels like we've become stuck in a collective rut, too nervous to stop populating channels that have become staid, worthless or toxic, too trepidacious to ask 'why?', too disempowered to update the website footer.
Worse still, a lot of that early giddiness around engagement seems to have been usurped by brands in full broadcast mode. It's not quite bait-and-switch, but neither is it living up to the Web 2.0 promise of a two-way comms street.
Social media feels less and less like the over-used cliché of a global town square, rather somewhere you only turn up at to brag or pick a fight.
In case all of this seems like the disjointed venting of a person who hasn't actually managed a corporate social account for almost a decade, I'd strongly urge you to read Matt Locke, Hugh Garry and Anjali Ramachandran's fantastic series of Broken posts on the Attention Matters site.
They bring data, insights and well-founded reasoning to the table in a careful dissection of why things just don't work like they used to (and, importantly, what you can do about it).
I also really enjoyed technology entrepreneur Anil Dash's hopeful and upbeat article published in the dying embers of 2023. In The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again he highlights just how dispersed things have gotten as people vote with their feet and jump onto other networks:
Consider the dramatic power shift happening right now in social media. Twitter’s slide into irrelevance and extremism as it decays into X has hastened the explosive growth of a whole host of newer social networks. There’s the nerdy vibes of the noncommercial Mastodon communities (each one with its own set of Dungeons and Dragons rules to play by), the raucous hedonism of Bluesky (like your old Tumblr timeline at its most scandalous), and the at-least-it’s-not-LinkedIn noisiness of Threads, brought to you by Instagram, meaning Facebook, meaning Meta. There are lots more, of course, and probably another new one popping up tomorrow, but that’s what’s great about it. A generation ago, we saw early social networks like LiveJournal and Xanga and Black Planet and Friendster and many others come and go, each finding their own specific audience and focus.
In a similar vein, Katie Notopoulos's How to fix the Internet in MIT Technology Review reflects on the way decentralisation and different options are breathing new life into what's become stale or pernicious:
The solution to the internet is more internet: more apps, more spaces to go, more money sloshing around to fund more good things in more variety, more people engaging thoughtfully in places they like. More utility, more voices, more joy.
Time to update those social icons?
So what's a little ole Social Media Manager to do?
Maybe nothing. Maybe you're perfectly happy with how your social presence is ticking along. And maybe you are far, far better placed than me, a wizened old contrarian 😂, to be calling the shots on this.
However if any of the above chimes with you, then I'd urge you to carve out some time to think and to ask some of those 'why' questions.
It's a new year, lots of stuff is up in the air and your diary might be a little less booked up. Any of the following would be a good starting point:
Do some quick and dirty analysis (be it your own website stats, or the latest Ofcom research)
Find some sensible people or like-minded peers to chat things through with (buy everyone a coffee as a welcome-to-2024 gesture)
Go back to mapping the basics (what are my overall objectives? what's my product? what do I want people to know, feel and do?)
Dig into your ROI – what returns are you really looking to get? (likes and shares and comments and reach and yadda yadda. Time to get sharp and specifice. If it's easier, pick one of your channels to scrutinize initially)
Absorb some blog posts (there's a huge array of links to follow up on in Attention Matters alone)
Get a feel for different sorts of communities (dip your toe into Threads, Bluesky, Discord, or Mastodon. I'm not saying any of these are necessarily right for you, but it's helpful to know what's out there)
Abandon X altogether (if you need further persuasion, here's some sage advice from James Whatley and some engaging conversation between Ezra Klein and PJ Vogt)
Pause everything 'cos it's all too terrible (the post below from NYT's Robinson Meyer on Threads made me smile through my tears)
Many organisations are feeling the squeeze in terms of time, resource and budget. Continuing to put effort into activity that maybe isn't delivering what it was originally intended to isn't ideal for anyone. Wouldn't it be great to invest that energy elsewhere?
You could do less or you could do different, but in the spirit of new year/new start, I'd implore you to do something.
Am I talking nonsense? Does any of this resonate? I'd love to hear. Feel free to contact me here, or connect on LinkedIn or Bluesky.