Is Social MEDIA Dead?
I know this is the same title I used for my last podcast, but promise this is a slightly different approach to the topic as the world has turned in the past week.
In my podcast I focussed on how the social was missing from most brands’ approaches to the platforms, and how they’ve essentially become broadcast media channels for many. Today I’m going to chat out how as media channels, they’re not really performing either.
I’ve been asked multiple times this past week where brands should put their spend if not Twitter, and it strikes me that people were spending on Twitter advertising anyway.
The cold, hard reality, is the audience that are on Twitter and aren’t on other social media platforms is tiny. The audiences who say Twitter is their favourite social media platform, the one they spend the most time on, or preferred one to see advertising, are even smaller. The CPM is higher to reach people on Twitter than Meta, Pinterest or TikTok, with only LinkedIn and potentially Snap (depending on your audience) running more expensive. Unless you’re specifically using paid media to run a promoted trend on something that you want to drive earned media, or to try to promote your brand as part of a bigger conversation around a cultural topic or moment that your audience are already talking about positively, at scale, primarily on Twitter; why would you choose it above all the other channels?
Unless you’ve got an incredibly big budget and have maxed out spend on the other channels, in which case maybe it’s best to hand the remaining money back to your CMO so they can do something more productive with it?
Right now, we’re looking a lot harder at television for the new year. No, really. Double so through digital TV players where you get the targeting plus the unskippable thirty second long big screen experience.
Meta platforms have served us well for D2C, with a much better return than the prodigal 2CPA<CLV. But they’re really bad for building brand, which we do fantastically through organic on a vide variety of platforms.
Pinterest has been pretty good at shifting units, but the targeting is more broad and it feels like I’m not entirely sure where I’m winning.
TikTok is fantastic for brand commercials, but alas, not if your product isn’t eligible to be on the platform in the first place.
The economy spluttered into autumn, prompting CPM to creep up as brands launched Christmas campaigns on November 1st in an attempt to get sales through tills before the Autumn statement aired and October energy bills landed. We decided then not to complete with M&S, Amazon, Heineken, every World Cup sponsor and Christmas movie coming out, by bowing out of paid social media for the year.
Why spend more to get less impressions while costs are going up and basket sizes and conversion rates dropping?
We’ve almost sold out of our winter boxes and are currently racking up all the dry January activations, there really isn’t any need to complete other than ego telling us it feels right to run Christmas ads.
Which brings me back to Twitter. Would any of our activations the past two years have performed better if we moved budget away from Meta, Google and Pinterest, towards the little blue bird? Nope.
That’s the huge, massive, existential problem Twitter faces. No matter how many forms of adult content they manage to monetise, how many tens of thousands sign up for blue and whatever else they have planned, the bottom line is Twitter is a media platform and it’s customers are brands who pay big bags of money to run adverts. Those big bags of money make up the vast majority of their revenue and always will.
And right now, as the time people spend on social media dwindles and the return on investing in paid media on those platforms wilts, they’re failing as both communications channels and media channels.
Attention isn’t worth what it used to be. And until the price of inventory comes down on social media, they’re going to face increasing challenges from other media channels that are currently under-priced.
