Over the past few weeks, there has been some debate on the blogging/social channel Medium, over a post entitled “A Teenager’s View on Social Media”. The post, written by Andrew Watts (an actual teen), has attracted such interest because it is meant to offer an authoritative opinion on how teens actually use social channels. While it is a narrow qualitative view, the post goes some way to confirm what some other commentators and analysts have suspected: that Facebook is not used that much, Instagram is used a lot, Snapchat continues to grow, and not many young people ‘get’ Twitter.
While it can be argued this is indicative for some teenagers in the United States, it can be seen as something of a confirmation bias. In a response (also on Medium), Danah Boyd, a Visiting Professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, dispelled some of the perceptions the teenager’s view had painted. Ms. Boyd pointed out that whilst Mr. Watts’ view may be representative of some teenagers, she believes that “ teens’ use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background”. This is an interesting insight as it reconsiders what metrics really convey about social media usage.
Ev Williams, one of the founders of both Twitter and Medium, recently wrote a post on what is wrong with social metrics, in terms of monthly users, or the size of the audience. Instagram surpassed Twitter in the number of users at the end of 2014. A week later, some financial analysts valued Instagram at $35 billion, on the basis of the size of the audience and potential for brand reach. Ev Williams disputed the idea that Instagram was bigger than Twitter in his post: “So is Instagram larger than Twitter? No — it’s different than Twitter. One is largely private, the other largely public. One focuses on photos, the other on ideas. They’re both very large, and they’re both growing.”
It can be argued that the bigger question for marketers around social channels, is how much attention they now attract. With the rise of mobile, the battleground for attention has become infinite. Wired Magazine also recently touched on the issue: “We don’t learn about the world from The New York Times, we learn about it from the Times stories that our family and friends share or that show up as push notifications four minutes before one from The Guardian does. Thirty percent of American adults get news from Facebook, according to the Pew Research Center, and more than half of Americans got news from a smartphone within the past week, according to the American Press Institute. And these metrics are just going up, up, up. The question for news publishers is no longer how to draw an audience to their sites, it’s how to implant themselves into their audience’s lives.”
This not only applies to reading, but watching and listening too. Mobile has reconfigured how people consume all types of media, and social tends to be the primary delivery mechanism. The diversity and scale of social allows for more granular audiences, and more targeted delivery of messaging. However, with the battle for attention, it is essential that social channels give greater transparency on how much attention an audience will give, in order to help brands make the most effective messaging possible.
