Make Your Content More Social

By: Sorab Ghaswalla

In April this year, social media networks got a collective shock. The UK-headquartered cosmetics major Lush announced it was dropping out of its social media accounts in the UK.

Lush UK’s announcement on Instagram said, “Increasingly, social media is making it harder and harder for us to talk to each other directly. We are tired of fighting with algorithms, and we do not want to pay to appear in your newsfeed.”

Which means the cosmetics retailer walked out from all posting/advertising on most of the social networks in the UK. Ironically, the reason was “….increasingly finding it difficult to talk to customers directly.”

Just think of it. Here`s someone, not just an individual but a cosmetics brand, that claims it`s no longer possible to have a direct conversation with its community members on the social networks!

Social networks starting arriving on the scene about a decade ago. Over time, they became a popular online marketing channel. With the addition of more and more platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, marketers were a happy bunch. What a terrific way to get a message across, they gushed.

Lush, and a few others, are now telling us the “message” is falling on deaf ears.

Ask yourself this - when was the last time you actually clicked on a link in a post or an update in any of your social media accounts?

Saturation, fatigue, content explosion, call it what you may, has got to you.

You, the consumer, is being inundated with not only new social networks, including instant messaging apps, but also with the copious amount of content posted on them. Almost as soon as you access your accounts, your eyes start to glaze over. You pause at a particular post or status update, ONLY if it interests you, or continue scrolling. Even then, 9 out of 10 times, you DO NOT click on the link given. Most read the few lines posted, and go on to just click the ‘Like’, ‘Retweet’ or ‘Share’ button.

So what’s happening here? Nobody is reading the original content. The 280 + characters seem sufficient to form an opinion or judgement. The intended message, if not entirely lost, has reached the audience in a truncated form. Analyzed another way, it also means your Site has started getting lesser traffic from your social media channels.

There are surveys out there that show that marketers have started getting that creepy feeling that the social media space is stagnating. No growth means less RoI.

Perhaps Lush and some other brands realized this and decided to move out, saving themselves funds which could be better utilized.

​Click here to read the rest.