Facebook has peaked. The platform’s American user base fell by 15 million between 2017 and 2019. The amount of time spent on the site has dropped too and is expected to continue declining from an average of 41 minutes a day to 37 minutes by 2020. Among young people, Facebook’s main platform is largely ignored. Only around half of US teens aged between 13 and 17 have a Facebook account. They ignore the site in favor of Tik Tok, Snapchat, and Facebook’s own Instagram. With users increasingly concerned about privacy, and regulators clamping down on data and content, Facebook’s best days may well be behind it.
But the platform, and its ability to suck up huge amounts of personal data, has proved to be a vital tool for marketers. Their ability to target customers based on detailed demographics has allowed them to fire exactly the right messages at exactly the right people. So what will replace Facebook when the platform shrinks? What will marketing look like in a post-Facebook age and what can you do to prepare now?
More Media, Less Facebook
First, it’s important to bear in mind that Facebook won’t disappear overnight. Usage and audience might decline but Facebook will push back against its fall, slowing its descent. Even if it can’t recruit many new users, older users have already made the platform part of their lives, using it to stay in touch with old schoolfriends and keep track of groups and pages. With over two billion monthly users, it will take some time for Facebook to fall low enough to chase advertisers away completely.
Nor will the giant piles of data that Facebook has collected be so easily replaced. Newer platforms, such as Tik Tok, recognize that they have to make much smaller demands on users. They have to request less information in return for a greater sense of attachment to the platform, and less suspicion. (It hasn’t been a complete success.)
Marketers will continue to use Facebook for a while but they’ll use it less, and they’ll start to consider the outlet as just one channel among several instead of the most important part of a marketing strategy. That shift is already happening. TrackMaven, a company that provides social advertising analytics, recently released a new version of its analytics suite that covers advertising acrossFacebook, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Audience Network, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. That four of the six platforms tracked in the suite come from Facebook suggests that the company has little to worry about in the short term. But the idea that marketers need a suite to track all of their social media activity—and TrackMaven isn’t the only company offering cross-channel tracking—shows that marketers aren’t restricting themselves to Facebook (or even Facebook Audience Network or Facebook Messenger). They’re creating different kinds of content that they can spread across different channels to reach different markets. Analytics firms can see where the trend is going.
As Facebook continues to decline, we can expect to see more marketers experimenting with non-Facebook channels. They’ll continue building their brand pages and pitching ads at people in target locations and of target ages who have expressed an interest in sports shows or women’s fashion. But they’ll also look for other channels to supplement their falling results. Where will they go?
Snapchat has been something of a disappointment, and may well decline even faster than Facebook. Twitter, despite the push given by the president of the United States, has also seen a recent decline in usage. Monthly users fell by five million in the last few months of 2018, bringing the total to just 321 million. And Instagram has also shown a drop in engagement, while the pushback against influencer culture means that content on the platform is continuing to change in the search for a new relevance.
So overall, social media sites have seen declines in the last few months, driven by a combination of privacy concerns, trolling, and over-familiarity which means that there’s no one outstanding place for marketers to move their advertising dollars. Nor is the decline at Facebook fast enough to push them out of any platform and into a new one completely or immediately.
Instead, it’s likely that some focus will move from the demographic-based targeting on Facebook to visual storytelling on Instagram. Marketers will experiment more with stories, with advertising, and with organic growth even as they continue to pitch on Facebook. The first move in the post-Facebook marketing environment, won’t be a massive exodus, it will be a small pull-down in advertising dollars on Facebook and a slight rise on Instagram.
What You Can Do Now
If you’re not already mixing your marketing channels, start now. Keep your demographic targeting on Facebook but add visual storytelling on Instagram to your marketing strategy. Understand how to create stories, maintain engagement, and build audiences across channels. Those other platforms might have felt like luxuries before but they’ll soon be staples for everyone.
2. LinkedIn Grows in Popularity
The decline of Facebook should be an opportunity for other social media platforms. Instagram will be one beneficiary but other image-driven sites should also benefit. While Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook all shrank slightly, Pinterest quietly hit 250 million users last year. Content placed on the site grew by 75 percent between 2017 and 2018, with the strongest growth in product ideas. It’s also rolled out new features, including a visual search tool, new organization methods for pins, and an additional Following feed. But while Pinterest has grown, it remains niche. Most users are women who use it as a mood board. Businesses with female markets might well find that it pays to develop a Pinterest strategy to supplement their declining Facebook activity, but Pinterest remains too focused to replace all Facebook activity.
One site that appears to be better placed is LinkedIn.
The fact that the site is even older than Facebook (it launched in 2003, a year before Facebook) means that it’s often overlooked when people consider Facebook rivals: surely if LinkedIn was going to beat Facebook, it would have done it by now. It’s also more niched than Facebook. Instead of being a place for chatting with friends and catching up with old classmates, LinkedIn has always been seen as a place to turn when you need to look for a job.
In 2016, though, Microsoft bought the platform, paying $26.2 billion for it. For the first time, the PC software company had a fully-formed social media platform. Over the following three years, membership of LinkedIn grew from around 250 million people to more than 610 million.
At the same time, LinkedIn has rolled out a bunch of new features, many of them drawn from other social media platforms. The news stream has become as important and as dynamic as the news feed on Facebook. In June 2019, the company announced a new algorithm intended to prioritize conversations about niche professional interests over viral content. The aim is to increase engagement and encourage people to comment and post instead of simply scrolling down the page. The move follows similar changes made by Facebook to favor posts from contacts over posts from brands, and Snapchat’s decision to separate social posts from brand posts.
LinkedIn has also introduced some social media tools used on other platforms, such as video and even live broadcasts.
While Facebook has stalled, LinkedIn has morphed from a job site to a social media site for professionals. Like Pinterest, it can’t be a complete replacement for a Facebook strategy. It’s not the place for a B2C business to build relationships with retail customers. But it is a place for B2B companies to build relationships with suppliers, with partners, and with potential recruits and colleagues.
What’s changed most on LinkedIn, though, is that LinkedIn now allows people who have honed their marketing skills on Facebook to apply those skills on LinkedIn. Marketing on Pinterest has a learning curve. Instagram requires a good stock of visual content. But LinkedIn is now very similar to Facebook, complete with a newsfeed, comments, likes, and addictive notifications.
Some of the careful selection and testing of content placed on Facebook to generate engagement will now take place on Microsoft’s platform. For any business that depends on personal relationships, whether that’s as a high-level executive or as a personal brand, LinkedIn may well become an effective replacement—or at least a significant part of the drift away from Facebook.
What You Can Do Now
Don’t just use LinkedIn to look for workers—or for work. Understand it’s already become a place for B2B marketers to build and strengthen connections. Get used to adding fresh content regularly. Comment on other people’s content and take part in the conversations that take place under posts. You should already be thinking of LinkedIn not as an employment site but as kind of online conference. You benefit from that conference when you talk to other participants and when you take to the stage.
- Social Media Will Gave Way to News Sources
In August 2018, the world got to see what life would be like without Facebook. For about 45 minutes a “technical issue” stopped the platform from displaying at all. Anyone visiting the site got a blank page. So what happened? Where did users accustomed to relying on Facebook for their news, information, updates and procrastination go?
The answer, it seems, as that without Facebook available to aggregate content for them, they went directly to the source of the content. Traffic to publisher sites rose by 11 percent, while use of new companies’ mobile apps increased by 22 percent. Users also went back to the old-fashioned way of finding content on the Internet: they searched for it. Search traffic increased by 8 percent during that 45-minute hiatus.
That short break provides a useful clue to where marketers need to look if they’re still to reach audiences in an age of declining Facebook. They have two options.
The first is to advertise directly on content sites. Traditional publishers such as newspapers and magazines have long complained about the raw deal they were getting first from online advertisers and then from Facebook. The decline of interest in Facebook gives advertisers a reason to go back to places in which readers have already placed trust. Marketers should find that it pays to advertise again on sites like The New York Times or Peopledepending on who they’re targeting. That could mean a rise in the use of Google’s advertising networks but it will also mean a rise in direct placements as well as a search for more effective forms of advertising than traditional banner ads. TripAdvisor, for example, promotes sponsored placements that put advertisers’ properties high on relevant pages, blending them into the site. As direct advertising returns, some publications will look for more ways to make the most of those opportunities—and readers will complain even more about the difficulty of telling apart editorial content from commercial content.
But during that brief Facebook blackout, people didn’t just turn to trusted media sources to find the information they wanted. They also turned to publishers’ mobile apps.
The biggest change that has taken place since the launch of Facebook has been the rise of mobile computing. It’s also a change that Facebook has managed well, moving with users as they drifted away from the desktop to accessing the platform through the firm’s mobile app. For users today, the Internet browser is just one general way of accessing information. If they know where they can expect to find the information they want, they’ll open the app and get it straight from the source.
That will give businesses both more power and a greater challenge. On the one hand, they won’t have to communicate with their audience through a third party. They won’t be “renting” space on LinkedIn or be restricted by Pinterest’s preferences. They will have full control over their content.
On the other hand though, good quality apps aren’t cheap to produce, and an app will require a complete content strategy. Giving people a reason to download an app, keep the app on their phone, then open it regularly once they’ve downloaded it is much more demanding than hiring a social media expert and publishing occasional posts. It’s likely to be a solution for large brands but a bigger challenge for the smaller companies that make up the bulk of the economy. They’ll miss the easy access to their market that they used to have on Facebook.
What You Can Do Now
The return of real news offers multiple opportunities for businesses. In particular, it means more work for publicists who will have to use their connections to get stories into the mainstream press. If you’re not using PR now, start thinking of how to work it into your marketing strategy. You can also go further and develop your own content hub. That might be as simple as reinvigorating your blog and as complex as creating your own app. And it might be time to think again about direct placements for your ads. If it’s not time yet, it will be soon.
- Technology Will Try to Replace Facebook
As the popularity of Facebook declines, users will initially return to the sources they find familiar: news sites and brand applications. LinkedIn will fill some of the gap but not all of it so new companies will look to take up the slack.
Even as the advertising channels that take over from Facebook will demand less personal data, the rise of artificial intelligence will be able to make better use of the data that sites and brands do collect. They’ll be able to target their messages, both its placement and its content.
If Libra, the cryptocurrency promoted by Facebook takes off, its use won’t be on Facebook alone. The coin is managed by a consortium of 27 partners drawn from the worlds of technology and finance. The integration of wallets across different platforms will shorten the customer journey and motivate marketers to push for a sale without directing them to a website. It’s still too early to predict how that would look but Google has already identified micro-moments, a period lasting no more than a few seconds that businesses have to use before the readers has moved on to the next piece of content. If marketers can use those moments to hook a customer, reel them in, and make a sale, they’ll have little reason to miss Facebook.
What You Can Do Now
You don’t have to stock up on cryptocurrencies, and while you might want to start accepting Bitcoin, don’t expect a flood of customers with wallets bursting with digital coins. They’re still too volatile to function as a currency. Instead, settle now for understanding how cryptocurrencies work, and how to buy, sell, and store them. If Libra does take off, you won’t want to be left behind.
None of these changes is going to happen quickly. Facebook is much larger than MySpace or Friendster was when they stalled then declined. They’re also better managed with leadership that’s shown it can handle change. But it is possible that one of the two biggest marketing platforms on the Web has reached its peak, and advertisers need to start making new plans.
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But the platform, and its ability to suck up huge amounts of personal data, has proved to be a vital tool for marketers. Their ability to target customers based on detailed demographics has allowed them to fire exactly the right messages at exactly the right people. So what will replace it? What will marketing look like in a post-Facebook age?
More Media, Less Facebook
First, it’s important to bear in mind that Facebook won’t disappear overnight. Usage and audience might decline but Facebook will push back against its fall, slowing its descent. Even if it can’t recruit many new users, older users have already made the platform part of their lives, using it to stay in touch with old schoolfriends and keep track of groups and pages. With over two billion monthly users, it will take some time for Facebook to fall low enough to chase advertisers away completely.
Nor will the giant piles of data that Facebook has collected be so easily replaced. Newer platforms, such as Tik Tok, recognize that they have to make much smaller demands on users. They have to request less information in return for a greater sense of attachment to the platform, and less suspicion. (It hasn’t been a complete success.)
Marketers will continue to use Facebook for a while but they’ll use it less, and they’ll start to consider the outlet as just one channel among several instead of the most important part of a marketing strategy. That shift is already happening. TrackMaven, a company that provides social advertising analytics, recently released a new version of its analytics suite that covers advertising acrossFacebook, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Audience Network, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. That four of the six platforms tracked in the suite come from Facebook suggests that the company has little to worry about in the short term. But the idea that marketers need a suite to track all of their social media activity—and TrackMaven isn’t the only company offering cross-channel tracking—shows that marketers aren’t restricting themselves to Facebook (or even Facebook Audience Network or Facebook Messenger). They’re creating different kinds of content that they can spread across different channels to reach different markets. Analytics firms can see where the trend is going.
As Facebook continues to decline, we can expect to see more marketers experimenting with non-Facebook channels. They’ll continue building their brand pages and pitching ads at people in target locations and of target ages who have expressed an interest in sports shows or women’s fashion. But they’ll also look for other channels to supplement their falling results. Where will they go?
Snapchat has been something of a disappointment, and may well decline even faster than Facebook. Twitter, despite the push given by the president of the United States, has also seen a recent decline in usage. Monthly users fell by five million in the last few months of 2018, bringing the total to just 321 million. And Instagram has also shown a drop in engagement, while the pushback against influencer culture means that content on the platform is continuing to change in the search for a new relevance.
So overall, social media sites have seen declines in the last few months, driven by a combination of privacy concerns, trolling, and over-familiarity which means that there’s no one outstanding place for marketers to move their advertising dollars. Nor is the decline at Facebook fast enough to push them out of any platform and into a new one completely or immediately.
Instead, it’s likely that some focus will move from the demographic-based targeting on Facebook to visual storytelling on Instagram. Marketers will experiment more with stories, with advertising, and with organic growth even as they continue to pitch on Facebook. The first move in the post-Facebook marketing environment, won’t be a massive exodus, it will be a small pull-down in advertising dollars on Facebook and a slight rise on Instagram.
2. LinkedIn Grows in Popularity
The decline of Facebook should be an opportunity for other social media platforms. Instagram will be one beneficiary but other image-driven sites should also benefit. While Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook all shrank slightly, Pinterest quietly hit 250 million users last year. Content placed on the site grew by 75 percent between 2017 and 2018, with the strongest growth in product ideas. It’s also rolled out new features, including a visual search tool, new organization methods for pins, and an additional Following feed. But while Pinterest has grown, it remains niche. Most users are women who use it as a mood board. Businesses with female markets might well find that it pays to develop a Pinterest strategy to supplement their declining Facebook activity, but Pinterest remains too focused to replace all Facebook activity.
One site that appears to be better placed is LinkedIn.
The fact that the site is even older than Facebook (it launched in 2003, a year before Facebook) means that it’s often overlooked when people consider Facebook rivals: surely if LinkedIn was going to beat Facebook, it would have done it by now. It’s also more niched than Facebook. Instead of being a place for chatting with friends and catching up with old classmates, LinkedIn has always been seen as a place to turn when you need to look for a job.
In 2016, though, Microsoft bought the platform, paying $26.2 billion for it. For the first time, the PC software company had a fully-formed social media platform. Over the following three years, membership of LinkedIn grew from around 250 million people to more than 610 million.
At the same time, LinkedIn has rolled out a bunch of new features, many of them drawn from other social media platforms. The news stream has become as important and as dynamic as the news feed on Facebook. In June 2019, the company announced a new algorithm intended to prioritize conversations about niche professional interests over viral content. The aim is to increase engagement and encourage people to comment and post instead of simply scrolling down the page. The move follows similar changes made by Facebook to favor posts from contacts over posts from brands, and Snapchat’s decision to separate social posts from brand posts.
LinkedIn has also introduced some social media tools used on other platforms, such as video and even live broadcasts.
While Facebook has stalled, LinkedIn has morphed from a job site to a social media site for professionals. Like Pinterest, it can’t be a complete replacement for a Facebook strategy. It’s not the place for a B2C business to build relationships with retail customers. But it is a place for B2B companies to build relationships with suppliers, with partners, and with potential recruits and colleagues.
What’s changed most on LinkedIn, though, is that LinkedIn now allows people who have honed their marketing skills on Facebook to apply those skills on LinkedIn. Marketing on Pinterest has a learning curve. Instagram requires a good stock of visual content. But LinkedIn is now very similar to Facebook, complete with a newsfeed, comments, likes, and addictive notifications.
Some of the careful selection and testing of content placed on Facebook to generate engagement will now take place on Microsoft’s platform. For any business that depends on personal relationships, whether that’s as a high-level executive or as a personal brand, LinkedIn may well become an effective replacement—or at least a significant part of the drift away from Facebook.
- Social Media Will Gave Way to News Sources
In August 2018, the world got to see what life would be like without Facebook. For about 45 minutes a “technical issue” stopped the platform from displaying at all. Anyone visiting the site got a blank page. So what happened? Where did users accustomed to relying on Facebook for their news, information, updates and procrastination go?
The answer, it seems, as that without Facebook available to aggregate content for them, they went directly to the source of the content. Traffic to publisher sites rose by 11 percent, while use of new companies’ mobile apps increased by 22 percent. Users also went back to the old-fashioned way of finding content on the Internet: they searched for it. Search traffic increased by 8 percent during that 45-minute hiatus.
That short break provides a useful clue to where marketers need to look if they’re still to reach audiences in an age of declining Facebook. They have two options.
The first is to advertise directly on content sites. Traditional publishers such as newspapers and magazines have long complained about the raw deal they were getting first from online advertisers and then from Facebook. The decline of interest in Facebook gives advertisers a reason to go back to places in which readers have already placed trust. Marketers should find that it pays to advertise again on sites like The New York Times or Peopledepending on who they’re targeting. That could mean a rise in the use of Google’s advertising networks but it will also mean a rise in direct placements as well as a search for more effective forms of advertising than traditional banner ads. TripAdvisor, for example, promotes sponsored placements that put advertisers’ properties high on relevant pages, blending them into the site. As direct advertising returns, some publications will look for more ways to make the most of those opportunities—and readers will complain even more about the difficulty of telling apart editorial content from commercial content.
But during that brief Facebook blackout, people didn’t just turn to trusted media sources to find the information they wanted. They also turned to publishers’ mobile apps.
The biggest change that has taken place since the launch of Facebook has been the rise of mobile computing. It’s also a change that Facebook has managed well, moving with users as they drifted away from the desktop to accessing the platform through the firm’s mobile app. For users today, the Internet browser is just one general way of accessing information. If they know where they can expect to find the information they want, they’ll open the app and get it straight from the source.
That will give businesses both more power and a greater challenge. On the one hand, they won’t have to communicate with their audience through a third party. They won’t be “renting” space on LinkedIn or be restricted by Pinterest’s preferences. They will have full control over their content.
On the other hand though, good quality apps aren’t cheap to produce, and an app will require a complete content strategy. Giving people a reason to download an app, keep the app on their phone, then open it regularly once they’ve downloaded it is much more demanding than hiring a social media expert and publishing occasional posts. It’s likely to be a solution for large brands but a bigger challenge for the smaller companies that make up the bulk of the economy. They’ll miss the easy access to their market that they used to have on Facebook.
- Technology Will Try to Replace Facebook
As the popularity of Facebook declines, users will initially return to the sources they find familiar: news sites and brand applications. LinkedIn will fill some of the gap but not all of it so new companies will look to take up the slack.
Even as the advertising channels that take over from Facebook will demand less personal data, the rise of artificial intelligence will be able to make better use of the data that sites and brands do collect. They’ll be able to target their messages, both its placement and its content.
If Libra, the cryptocurrency promoted by Facebook takes off, its use won’t be on Facebook alone. The coin is managed by a consortium of 27 partners drawn from the worlds of technology and finance. The integration of wallets across different platforms will shorten the customer journey and motivate marketers to push for a sale without directing them to a website. It’s still too early to predict how that would look but Google has already identified micro-moments, a period lasting no more than a few seconds that businesses have to use before the readers has moved on to the next piece of content. If marketers can use those moments to hook a customer, reel them in, and make a sale, they’ll have little reason to miss Facebook.
None of these changes is going to happen quickly. Facebook is much larger than MySpace or Friendster was when they stalled then declined. They’re also better managed with leadership that’s shown it can handle change. But it is possible that one of the two biggest marketing platforms on the Web has reached its peak, and advertisers need to start making new plans.
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