Social Media Is Only Social If You’re Alone
As I mentioned in an earlier post, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter would have made my teens and twenties a far more interesting time. These sites are ideal for the sort of audience whose social life is of paramount importance, whose lives revolve around their friends and going out, and who’d rather not be interacting with the people around them (e.g. their roommates and/or parents.)If indeed there are actually any people around them.
Add people—spouses and children, in particular—and suddenly the allure of constant Facebook updates dims. You’ve reached a different point in your life. One where social life takes a back seat and family life becomes your primary focus. Which is why the oft-repeated notion, that social media is going to take over our lives and become our primary means of interacting with the interweb strikes me as so completely naïve.
Now it’s no surprise that the majority of people promoting social networking sites as the Second Coming are, indeed, of an age where their social life is the focus of their existence. Many of them, I would guess, fall into yet a third category of social media user: the young professional careerist, someone working long hours, perhaps in an unfamiliar city or unfamiliar country, and a site like Facebook is their only social life
Now I realize that when you are young and single, it’s pretty hard to imagine a time when your life might be dramatically different. To wit, let’s look at one comment I received when I posted this same treatise on The Toad Stool:
In my view, Social Media gives you the opportunity to be scratch your socialization itch while letting you simultaneously ignore the dumbass sitting at the other end of your couch if you so choose.
The point being that the poster here could not imagine that “the dumbass sitting at the other end of your couch†might someday be his spouse or child. Someone he’d have no wish to actually ignore.
Which brings us back to my original point: social networking doesn’t work for a large portion of the population because if we’re socializing online, we’re being anti-social to the people we live with. And last time I checked, a goodly number of Americans lived in family units where the main focus of their social life was with other family members. Not members of their Facebook network.
Now this doesn’t mean we should discount the importance of social networking. For the aforementioned demos, it’s a huge part of their lives. But for people outside that demo, social networking will take on other, less all-encompassing forms.
Take LinkedIn, for instance. I love LinkedIn, as do many of my similarly-situated friends, because it allows us all to keep track of each other in a way that works with our lives. Most of my LinkedIn contacts are people I know through work. I like them all well enough, but they’re not social friends and so I don’t particularly care what music they’re listening to or what movies they enjoy. In fact, it would add an awkward stalkerish dimension to many of those relationships if I did.
What LinkedIn provides, however, is a socially acceptable way to get back in touch with people you’d lost touch with for no real reason. To maybe exchange an email or two and let each other know what you’ve been up to. It requires very little effort: I can check my LinkedIn account once or twice a week and be done with it, a fact I’ve found to be a potent sales tool when trying to convince friends to sign up.
Now that’s a social network that works for me. There are sure to be other sites developed that appeal to people who want even less involvement than that. And sites for people who want much, much more.
Social media is a wonderful innovation. But it’s far from a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. People (your customers) will cycle through various types of social media in the course of their lives, depending on what stage they are at and whether that stage is about external or internal socialization. (Because remember, it’s only “social†if you’re alone.) It’s something that gets swept under the rug in all the hoopla, but something that marketers need to keep top of mind if they want to succeed.
