Will social media fatigue become an issue?
2 Comments
This is a little different from my usual posts, but I just wanted to put an idea out there…
The concept of social media fatigue came to me on a 20-mile run through San Francisco last Saturday – along Ocean Beach and Golden Gate Park. The weather was beautiful, blossoms were on trees, and I felt really good. “This is living,” I thought – not sitting behind a screen typing updates.
Yes, I know that for many of us, social networking is our job. But I’m trying to step outside my role as a marketer for a moment, and see things from the consumers’ perspective.
As a social media user - I want technology to enhance my offline experience….not exist in its own little world.
Offline is where my best friends are, where the best experiences happen, and where real memories are made.
I want to spend more time outside, and less time online.
Because of this, I see mobile and augmented reality technology having huge potential.
I’m not saying social media is not useful. I’m just wondering if more people will get tired of various social media activities, and what that means for us as marketers.
Any thoughts?
[Photo credit: Kevin Krejci]
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As consumers we gravitate to places that give us more choices. As consumers, we want to have the choice of whether to spend more time outside, online, or some combination of the two.
If you’re a business trying to market yourself to the consumer, you have the choice of whether to spend your time online with employees/customers/partners or offline with employees/customers/partners. If you choose to go outside and not work, there are businesses that will happily pick up the slack. As social media becomes used in more places, it creates a more efficient marketplace that punishes businesses that choose not to work 24×7.
Of course, that last bit only works if businesses choose to play by the same rules using the same tools as consumers. Just as Best Buy broke from the herd and started firing bad customers and reinventing the way it chose to deploy its resources to address its stream of consumers, so too will businesses find new ways to avoid burnout. Most of your social networking tools are first generation solutions that don’t scale and require constant monitoring. We see a future based on treating streams as workflows that enforce business rules that are able to differentiate between awesome customers and lookie-loos. It’s the difference between driving traffic…and driving sales.
Josiah,
I wonder the same things myself. Mobile is certainly the future for much of social media. Stats confirm that huge numbers of people access their accounts from mobile devices. I think that will only accelerate as devices become more capable and widespread. Personally I access all of my social media accounts more often with a smart phone than a traditional computer.
Will social media use decline overall? In individual instances, yes. A great number of people jump on a network, get excited about what you can do on it and spend a great deal of time there. Their usage will taper off to a point that the service is usable. Some people will drift away entirely. But for a long time, new users will continue to come on board. In a few years you won’t hear so much about social media, it will just be an accepted part of the way of things.
Much the same thing happened when the web was first coming online. Everyone was talking about surfing the web. Does anyone do that anymore? More often people are now using the web in practical ways that complement their lives. Often that leads to even more time spent as you transfer other activities such as watching broadcast TV to watching video online.
Overall I think SM will become less noticeable, but more useful.
Keith West
DigiForce- Internet Staffing and Execution