First, why should you even listen to me (Jaskaran) about state of social media being worse than ever? First, I track this industry every week with my newsletter & mind for 20,000+ marketers. And mainly because I care about this social media marketing space.

A little context: These insights below are more oriented toward helping marketers, creators & Big Businesses working in Social Media Marketing. If you are a small business or newbie, I suggest reading my other blogpost on social media trends & Insights for beginners.

1/ Average & Inspo are the constant

Most users are very much tapped out while watching short-form content. They are on the app to watch tiktok, reels or youtube. That’s the first thought and every time user open the app, the algorithm shows the average of what they already saw. All the recommendations are the same, that is the loop.

This really means to be memorable & do brand marketing through social. You need to be creative. But what’s the advice on internet? Blend into the tiktok styles, and that’s happening.

 

Every f**king brand & agency is using the same trending audio & Capcut template. That doesn’t build anything for you. You are becoming the part of average, the best advice is to be creative about what your brand is, don’t become the part of loop. You will get lost.

2/ Social Media Search is future but

TikTok’s search feature and their Keyword Ads currently rolling out to Advertisers are making a splash in the space. But Apart from Youtube, All other search features on Twitter, Instagram & LinkedIn are going through a nightmare.

Instagram’s search feature isn’t fully capable of showing accurate content.

LinkedIn’s Content Search always shows more recent content, instead of relevant.

Twitter is growing their own stuff. They have advanced search feature but regular search is filled with bot content for every industry.

For Retail & DTC, Social Search is driving massive growth on TikTok. But the way overall state of social search looks, it will take much longer to make the results more relevant.

3/ Influencer marketing is dumb

Especially with agencies & Influencer tools, this is a honest take as someone who consults these newly born agencies. The issue is most brands don’t see it as brand marketing. It is still very much: we have a budget. One of the biggest examples is Chipotle, they get influencer marketing but are experimenting so much with agencies & platforms. I have seen their testimonials on 2-3 different new influencer agencies.

The industry is moving very dumb because of the whole heavy VC funding into creator economy & new agencies. It is very clear to me, that smart brands will make more internal hirings to find better influencers & oboard matured creators as influencers strategy consultants.

 

Major Clarification: I am not suggesting this marketing channel doesn’t work or all the tools are worthless. I am a marketing influencer myself, what I mean is understand saving time vs getting valuable.

Most Agencies & Ad Tech in the Influencer marketing space is saving time. If you want to save time, just hire another employee who reaches out to influencers. Because that’s what 99.9% agencies do. If you want value, choose your agency or Tech solutions carefully. You can hire an expert like Jaskaran (me) to quality check your agency & Tech. It can save you thousands of dollars.

 

4/ Data Gaps are getting huge; AI will save Paid Media

There is more data than ever in this industry with users spending more time online. At the same time, there are huge data gaps causing irrelevant Ad targeting. Meta’s Interest based Ad targeting has been suffering. Snap & Pinterest have growing audiences but in the last earning report, statememts are pretty same. AI will make the advertising functions better.

The whole Ad Tech industry is preaching AI to fill the gap within the third party datasets. I can’t predict the future of AI targeting for social media advertising. But currently you need to focus on your data and market knowledge before relying on the targeting done by the platform or recommended by your Ad Rep.

5/ The Industry is Going through “Know it all”

In your workspace or as a solo marketer, at the end of the day your boss is also a social media consumer. And they are very likely to he “I know it all” based on their social media feed. Showing the sign of being a bad marketer, generalising is a marketing sin.

That’s why to prevent yourself from the bad ideas and strategies. Build pattern sheets and your own social media guidelines. A pattern of how your social looks and what the general guidelines of content in social for X industry are, both will help you.

Hand them the sheet before moving to the idea. Because doing anything relative to brand marketing leads to someone in the marketing or higher level saying what’s the ROI of this month for social?

Trends & Ideas from other people at the company don’t bring a good ROI. Plus, ROI of Social Media strategy work needs to be calculated every 90 days not 30. After 90 days think of switching to at least get the insights out about why it did or didn’t work.

I hope this helps you to understand. To find how reddit reacted to my insights, You can visit my original post on reddit.