The word "social" in social media may be heading toward the status of vestigial organ — present, technically functional, but no longer doing the work it was designed to do.
A study published by Incogni, based on a survey of 1,000 Americans, found that 55 percent of respondents are posting less to social media now than they did five years ago. The platforms that were built on the promise of connecting people are increasingly being used to watch them instead, with algorithms serving up short-form video entertainment in place of updates from friends and family.
The findings align with what industry observers have noted for some time. More users are retreating to private direct-message groups to share the kinds of personal updates that once populated public feeds. The town square, it seems, has become a movie theater.
This shift may surprise no one who has been paying attention. As far back as 2006, The Guardian published what became known as the 90-9-1 principle: on collaborative websites, about 90 percent of participants only consume content, 9 percent occasionally contribute, and just 1 percent create actively. Research from Pew in 2019 found that 80 percent of all posts on Twitter (as it was then called) came from just 10 percent of users.
The concentration of content creation in so few hands has consequences. More than half of the survey respondents said that maintaining a social media presence "feels like work" — a sentiment felt most acutely by younger users who grew up watching creators like MrBeast and concluded, perhaps optimistically, that making money online was relatively straightforward. (It is not. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, nearly half of all creators earn less than $15,000 a year from their efforts.)
Meta, for its part, has reported that time spent on Facebook and Instagram has actually increased in recent years, driven largely by the platforms' aggressive insertion of short videos into user feeds. People are not leaving; they are simply watching rather than participating.
For marketers, the implications are worth contemplating. The platforms they once used to spark conversations are now, increasingly, venues for passive consumption — less bulletin board, more broadcast.
Original story published in Social Media Today | A business community for the web's best thinkers on Social Media: "Social media is becoming less social"