The Rise of The Social Media Niche?
From ragedroid.com
Lately I’ve been seeing some new movement in my peers. There has been a growing discontent with Facebook as a lot of us have been using the service for about 6 years now. Many who are not just clinging to the weird exhibitionism and stalkerdom the site provides and who do not use the site for living seem to be increasingly losing interest due to a perceived irrelevance of the relationships and connections encouraged through a whole mess of changing features, there.
Because oh, right, people haven’t changed enough yet to remember why we stopped talking to them right after high school. And it only took another 6 years of seeing their political updates and dramatic breakups and thwarting unwelcome FB chat requests to determine that. Talented, we are.
It’s still love-hate, rebounding like a bad relationship that you just can’t completely get out of. I have a few friends who DELETE THEIR FACEBOOK in a fit of joy and then after several months of missing event invitations and not being able to answer “oh, did you see such and such on Facebook?!” in the affirmative, they will waffle and open it back up, delete 3/4 of their old friends, add a few new ones, then get fussy again.
Granted, I do think the issue is kinda two-fold.
- I still don’t think a lot of people really grasp how to handle and sort a wide range of generally communicative acquaintances and coworkers mixed in with close friends and relatives, both in how we behave and receive behaviors.
- Many of us are also starting to come into a sort of digital adulthood alongside our physical growth.
The one I’m going to address here is the latter. Young people seem to be starting to shed the mentality that came with “dating” social media early on and all the obsession, tragedy and connectivity it provided to settle into more stable patterns on the other side. We know who we are more now, we know who we want to be really connected to and we are now learning pick the right media to express ourselves.
Enter niche sites. Simple, focused apps and communities that allow us to do something very specific to our personalities that we want to do. Share pictures with a funky vintage filter? Check in to cool places in your city, or as you travel? Share music? Share your thoughts in a multimedia format quickly and efficiently?
There are people all over who just don’t “get” Twitter, but who took very quickly to Instagram. Or Tumblr. And there are those who use Reddit regularly but find Facebook utterly exasperating. Some people prefer to “check in” through apps like Foursquare but not Gowalla and there are even folks out there who still use MYSPACE. It’s true. And then we have the whole discussion of social media usage across the world (Seriously, what the hell is Overblog or Tuenti?) but that’s for another time.
So what do you think about the future of social media? Have you witnessed some of this irritation and departure?
Are we going to continue to just focus on drilling away at a handful of sites that “everyone” is on? Or will we start seeing more movement to adapt and grow and find our leads and audiences where they actually are rather than drive them into a pen where they are alleged to be or we think they should be?
And for my next entry we will ask the question: can one simply WALK into niche communities?
Discuss.
Hmmm, Jenn. Great questions. Not sure there are any hard and fast answers. All the same, I’ll make an attempt at answering those you posed in your last paragraph.
Will we continue to drill away at a handful of sites that “everyone” is on? Well, for the foreseeable future, why not? As marketing strategists, we represent brands large and small who are looking to get in front of as many people as they can. It makes sense to focus on the sites where “everyone” is first, because those sites offer the scale that interests our clients and the ability to target messaging broadly or narrowly.
I feel like you’re trying to weigh the value of scale versus the value of effectiveness here. For me, it’s not an either-or type of thing. Do we want to be efficient? Sure, we do. And if niche sites are where our dream customers are, then great, let’s go and engage there. However, there may not be enough of our dream customers on niche sites to satisfy our goals, and if that’s the case, then scale is a factor that we can’t overlook.
I hesitate to talk about scale, honestly, because I feel sort of uncool and outdated doing so. Maybe that’s because I’m coming at this from a kind of old school advertising perspective. That said, I feel like scale and sales are what clients care about more than anything else, and I’m afraid that we’re somewhat irrelevant if we can’t be a part of that picture. You’re right–let’s go where the people are. But let’s not forget that people aren’t just a sum of their interests. People are wonderfully quirky and complex, and we might uncover more prospective customers on a larger site simply because there are more people to interact with there.
Thanks for giving my brain a good workout, Jenn.
Looking forward to your next post on this.