As the holiday season prepares to give way to the New Year’s Eve and the end of 2011, the annual influx of year-end lists is about to begin in earnest. Top photos, top news stories, top Kardashian marriages… the lists are on their way. Lest anyone say that social media is any different, here for your consideration, in no particular order, are my Top Social Media Lessons of 2011 – part one today, and part two tomorrow.
Lesson #1: There is a significant amount of social network fatigue.
Google+. Quora. Empire Avenue. Chime.in. Unthink. It seemed in 2011 like there was a new or “hot” social network every month – and watching the social media in-crowd rush to adopt was a sometimes comical diversion. There was certainly an element of “shiny object syndrome” at play in the social media world.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Internet forum: people stopped rushing to the new toys just because they were new and shiny. Despite significant hype, most of the new social media tools and platforms limped along in 2011. That’s not necessarily because of any weaknesses inherent in these platforms or tools. We may have reached a saturation point with social networking, where people are spending about as much time online as they want to or can, and the pressure of needing to maintain a presence on yet another social platform is feeling more burdensome than exciting.
Newer social platforms can and will thrive in this environment – but they have to offer users a unique feature or function that they can’t get on any other network. (See the item below on Google+.) Just building it doesn’t mean that they’ll come -- because there are only so many hours in a day, and so many places people can maintain a presence online.
Lesson #2: Google+ isn’t “there” yet. But it could be.
After a flurry of attention following its beta launch in June and rapid acquisition of 25 million users, Google+ seemed poised to threaten Facebook and become the new “next big thing.” Many pundits and social media leaders left other networks altogether, trumpeting the superiority of Google’s new network. A few months later, growth has slowed (estimates currently range between 40 and 50 million users), and more cynical observers have proclaimed the network anything from a disappointment to an outright failure.
The truth is somewhere in between. It’s true that Google+ hasn’t lived up to much that initial promise, that too much of the conversation there still focuses on the network itself or the self-perceived importance of many of its users, and that both Google+’s slowing growth and the rapid response of Facebook has contributed to a sense of lost momentum for the fledgling network. Google hasn’t done anything in the past to engender much confidence in its ability to execute social media well (Buzz or Wave, anyone?). Most importantly, perhaps, Google+ just hasn’t seemed to offer a unique enough offering set to cut through social network fatigue and give users enough reasons to join yet another network.
But Google has a not-so-secret weapon that Facebook seems unlikely to be able to match even if it were suddenly willing: search. Integration of Google+ with its search engine, allowing posts to permeate query results, gives both individuals and brands incentive to put more content on Google+ than in Facebook’s walled garden. This integration’s begun already. When fully executed, it may well be Google+’s silver bullet, either helping that network convince more brands and users to choose it over Facebook, or forcing Facebook to adjust by opening more fully to outside search – a major departure from their model of trying to drive as much of the social media experience within its own walls.
The lesson for marketers: don’t listen to the naysayers and those who’ve proclaimed G+ a flop just yet. If Google actually gets search integration right, you’re going to want to be there.
Lesson #3: Facebook, for all its challenges, remains impressively nimble in the face of challenges to its hegemony.
Facebook has become, for many, the social network they love to hate. Privacy violations, dead-of-night terms of service changes, endless seemingly unnecessary layout and UI changes… they’ve led to almost a cottage industry of hating on Facebook. (I confess; privately, I’ve often been one of those grousing loudly about Facebook at times.) With Google+ launching with much fanfare this past summer, one might have read the tea leaves to think that Facebook might be facing a real challenge this year.
But for whatever the company’s faults, let it never be said that Facebook doesn’t nimbly and adroitly respond to market challenges to its position as the predominant social network. A couple of years ago, they introduced NewsFeed partly in response to Twitter’s emergence. In 2011, Facebook rolled out inline profile controls, introduced subscriptions to allow users to follow the updates of those they weren’t connected to as “friends,” and other changes reminiscent of Google+ that seemed to eliminate much the uniqueness or newness of the Plus’s offerings. Quick-response feature shifts like this reduced the threat posed by Google+ and lessened the incentive of casual users to leave Facebook for the newer platform.
It’s become sport in some circles to predict Facebook’s demise over sins both real and imagined. What we saw in 2011 is that the company is too attuned to their market, and too insightful about which complaints are merely annoyances and which are legitimate threats, to fall by the wayside as competitors arise.
Lesson #4: There is still a broad overemphasis on numbers.
There’s nothing like an easily identifiable and understandable success metric to make marketers and business leaders who don’t know (or often even want to know) any better happy. On the surface, number of fans or followers appears to show success and reach in social media – and many marketers, including some in this publication, seem to equate the size of one’s following with the reach of one’s influence.
But it’s just not that simple.
Reach is important; you have a better chance of getting your message out if you have 100,000 followers than 100, obviously. But by Twitter’s own admission, up to 50% of Twitter accounts are inactive. The numbers on Facebook aren’t much better; according to a survey by ExactTarget, 81% of consumers have either “unliked” a brand page or hidden a brand’s content from their news feed. With numbers like that, it becomes very difficult to associate number of followers or fans with true influence. How many of a hypothetical social media influencer or brand’s 100,000 Twitter followers are even actively using Twitter, much less paying attention specifically to that user? If looking purely at numbers of people who’ve “liked” a page, how can a brand know how many people are truly seeing or engaging with its content? (Yes, Facebook Insights reveals numbers of monthly active users, but those numbers aren’t as impressive as pure fan numbers and thus aren’t raised nearly as often.)
Among the more likely indicators of social media success and influence than just numbers would include: percentage of engaged fans/monthly actives, visits to a company’s web or e-commerce site, revenue generated, message penetration within social networks, brand awareness and perception among social network users, or almost anything that demonstrates actual engagement or business results rather than a somewhat unreliable count of people who took a one-time action.
Despite this, the bane of many a PR or marketing professional’s existence will be the client who issues mandates like “get me a million Facebook fans” without knowing what they want to do with those fans once acquired.
Lesson #5: While Americans make lots of noise about privacy, when all is said and done “privacy” doesn’t really factor into social media. Except for when our kids are involved.
We do a lot of talking about privacy and how important it is to us. There have even been academic studies by Ivy League institutions on the fundamental flaws in online social network privacy practices. Facebook is the poster child for privacy concerns online, with years of negative history involving consumer complaints and even investigations by various governments. But Twitter and even Google+ -- which promoted itself partly as a more privacy-friendly alternative to Facebook – have not been immune to privacy complaints. For all the howling about privacy settings being obscure, about information being sold or provided to marketers and businesses, and about how easy it is to have your information accessed or even shared by others, you could be forgiven for thinking that the social networking train might be about to derail.
Yet Facebook continues to accumulate users, with more than 800 million worldwide. Twitter claims more than 100 million active users. Google+ acquired somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million users in only six months. Whenever Facebook’s latest privacy hiccup is revealed, there is lots of indignance and talk of boycotts or leaving Facebook, but by and large it doesn’t happen. All the privacy talk would appear to be just that; people may not be comfortable with how the major social networks protect their privacy, those concerns do not deter us from being active in those networks.
Except when our children are involved. Then all bets are off. Case in point: Klout.
Klout entered 2011 as a darling of the social media influencer set, and carried a great deal of momentum through much of the year. Klout scores became the new black, spawning a veritable cottage industry of posts and counsel on how one could increase one’s score. But then two things happened: first, Klout changed its algorithm, resulting in fluctuations and drops in scores that upset many users. But equally importantly, Klout found itself accused of automatically creating profiles for users whether they’d signed up for the service or not – including minor children whose only exposure to the tool was having commented on their parents’ pages. Suddenly, the privacy violations were New York Times material, and Klout’s momentum has stalled and sputtered like a Kardashian marriage.
The lesson: for God’s sake, keep away from people’s kids on social networks. Not just “don’t proactively market to them,” but make a concerted effort to avoid them. There will be plenty of time to market to them after they’ve turned 18.
Tomorrow: five more social media lessons from 2011.
