Social media marketing in its original form is dead. This isn’t news: Facebook killed it off nearly four years ago, although many marketers don’t seem to have noticed yet. Ironically, though, there’s never been a better time to invest advertising budgets into social platforms – channels which have moved on from the fans, engagement and conversation metrics they were once built on.
Online advertising is starting to command meaningful ad budgets and with that comes a new level of scrutiny. Current skeletons in the closet include viewability (whether ads show in full to a user or are hidden down the page when a robot visits the site) and ad blocking (software which stops adverts appearing for users at all).
Having built up vast and consistent audiences who predominantly visit through dedicated mobile apps, the social media giants have built walled gardens where they can tackle these challenges head on. Ad blockers aren’t even a consideration here: Twitter has provided a 100% viewability guarantee for its video adverts since June and Facebook has recently matched this as part of an ongoing move from served to actually viewed impressions.
It’s easy to forget, but back in 2004 Facebook’s first ads were simple banner ads. Over the years, social platforms opened up to allow brands to act more like native users with their own pages, updates and means for users to interact directly. The pitch to advertisers was of a bold new world of conversations, earned media and engagement. For users of the site it made sense too – an advertiser could only be as disruptive as an annoying friend, and was just as easy to silence.
It was powerful stuff and tugged on marketing heart strings. It did, however, attract its fair share of criticism from traditionalists who didn’t see how it stacked up against the scale and effectiveness of traditional media. They questioned whether people truly wanted a relationship with their washing powder. As it turns out, they were largely right. Byron Sharp’s book How Brands Grow has provided much of the data that questions many assumptions about consumer loyalty and consideration that early social efforts depended on.
Although direct engagement can have positive effects on a small few, it remains a niche behaviour and is far outweighed by the broader reach these platforms offer. People ultimately have more important priorities than engaging with brands and so in reality rarely do. Although the big social networks have been cautious about publicly spelling out this U-turn, their product developments and private sales pitches tell a clear story.
In early 2012, Facebook was waving the white flag. The launch of promoted newsfeed posts admitted that being able to instantly reach the full Facebook audience was more valuable than the heavy slog of trying to build up a subscribed audience. It was effectively the mainstream relaunch of social media marketing, although Twitter had already been using a similar product to drive engagement at scale. Somewhat unexpectedly the marketing community largely interpreted this revolution as a tax on reaching their existing fans, even though they were actually now able to speak to hundreds of millions more potential consumers.
By the end of 2012, Facebook was privately taking large global brands through three-day workshops (so-called publishing garages) which specifically downplayed apps and engagement and talked up the need to publish great content to the passive millions. The following year they started to share research which showed no correlation between high visible engagement on the platform and resulting sales (but a strong correlation with reach and sales). More recently they’ve encouraged the use of the term “digital actions” – which is less alluring than “engagement” – and published data showing that only a tiny percentage of users interact at all, with most more passive than we like to imagine.
Product developments across the board have told a similar story. Facebook’s most revolutionary product has arguably been a reach and frequency planner which allows cost effective capping of frequency, alongside improvements in how it measures the real world impact of campaigns. Similarly, the huge rise in the importance of video speaks to platforms where consumers are more interested in passively absorbing content than having conversations with brands – autoplay video suggests that asking users to click on a big play button is already too much to ask.
Even Twitter, which was for a time a stronger defender of the original engagement narrative, has jumped all-in on video, has presentations on reach-based planning, and is no doubt developing similar frequency tools. Snapchat trialled some early options which let brands interact natively within the app, but has replaced those with a focus on encouraging brand content within the discovery section, where interaction isn’t even possible. Across the board platforms such as Instagram and Tumblr have promoted post opportunities ultimately sold to marketers based on who they can reach rather than the interaction that might follow.
If you attend social media conferences or read how-to blogs, you will see their efforts have been largely in vain. As an industry, we still obsess over the original promises of social media and the opportunity to build up followers, increase engagement or earn viral reach. These are all nice added values, but it’s hard to see them as the true gem to be uncovered here – Coca-Cola’s digital operations lead points out that he can buy more reach with $500 (£330) than he can earn from a 90-million-fan Facebook page. Even small businesses with tiny budgets should be wary of putting time and resources into social activities if they aren’t willing to pay at least small amounts to play – you may find your money goes a lot further than on traditional media but you still have to invest to begin with.
While online marketing weathers some of its current confidence crisis, the social platforms, with their own apps and native adverts, are ready and able to step in. Social media marketing died quietly four years ago, but today these platforms are only just starting to show their true resurgent strength as marketers embrace them for the huge scale and the storytelling opportunities they offer. Perhaps the passive majority of users who have been ignoring brands’ desperate pleas for engagement for the past decade will start seeing something worthwhile too.
Jerry Daykin is digital partner at Carat Global. You can follow his campaign for #DigitalSense in marketing on Twitter @jdaykin
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