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The waning health of social media
Did you feel it in the air throughout 2018? The slow and steady decline of Facebook’s heartbeat? While we’re at it, how many average consumers still use Twitter nowadays? What about Snapchat or Pinterest? And of course, may we never forget Google+ (rest ye in peace).
2018 saw scandal upon scandal in the world of social media, none more so than the mighty juggernaut that is Facebook who have slowly but surely chipped away at their user bases’ trust levels for quite some time now. Back in April 2018, Facebook’s largest scandal to date plagued our news sources with the Cambridge Analytica incident, in which approximately 87 million users had their data exposed without their consent. This scandal also pathed the way for others to be born upon it’s back, such as the discovery that Facebook had been retaining their user’s videos long after they had supposedly been deleted. This was discovered after Facebook’s response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal was to allow users to download an archive of everything Facebook had on them. Facebook apologised and played it off as a bug, though notably there were few who believed this explanation.
Meanwhile in Google’s camp, in October 2018, the corporation announced the upcoming closure of their own social network, Google+, officially marking the end to the platform that had suffered being the butt of every joke for years due to a massive lack of user engagement.
What does it all mean for business owners?
With user trust at an all-time low, so many people have turned, or intend to turn their back on social media. Or at least, consolidate their profiles, spend less time on social media, and/or remove any excess personal information from these platforms.
A quick survey of our colleagues reflected this trend, with several having deleted their Facebook profiles entirely and others who simply don’t open it anymore, yet “keep the account just in case”.
Many business owners have spent a great deal of time and effort building their social media presences over the years, and while it’s still reasonably important to continue doing so, it’s no longer something you can rely on as a sole marketing strategy.
We expect to see continuing concerns over privacy in 2019, and a further decline in social media trust. It’s important now more than ever before to ensure your business can still be found easily for user’s who’ve opted out of the world of liking and endless scrolling.
How then to stay in touch with your clients or customers
Staying in touch with your user base is really always best done on your own terms. By having your own website be your primary point of contact and reference for your clients, you ensure you retain full control over how you interact with your audience. Having a blog on your website that you regularly update is often seen as a strong point of trustworthiness with customers too. To ensure your blog posts are seen, you should of course still share them to your social media platforms, but it’s also worth bypassing the middle-man and taking your content directly to your audience by way of email marketing.
Platforms like Mailchimp make this both easy and very affordable, even for the smallest businesses. We’ve even written a guide on setting up an automated email newsletter which will send your customers a weekly or monthly email whenever you have new blog content for them to see – taking all the manual fuss off your plate!
In summary
It’s important now to cater to a world where not everybody uses social media anymore. Keep your website your primary focus and use email or physical marketing methods to reach your customers directly. With these practices in place, you can sit back in 2019 and watch whatever may be to come with ever-tightening privacy laws and social media scandals, knowing you’ll remain safely connected to your customers!
