A simple theory on why social media is losing its mojo
I’ve been trying to wrack my brains on how to present this theory elegantly, but that’s not going well. I’m going to try a more direct approach.
I believe that I’m seeing a trend whereby links shared by Twitter are being clicked on less frequently than they were even six months ago. I know that in my own experience that I can’t (and don’t) check out the vast majority of the links that I see within the different websites that I use. I think other people are experiencing the same situation.
Put simply, I think that each new social media service that we start using makes it harder to keep up with things in general. At first, the cornucopia of Web offerings seems really great and we start using them as soon as we hear about them. We’re exposed to lots of different people, new knowledge, and generally enjoy ourselves. Each new website seems like a shiny new toy. Sometimes we get caught up in the thrill in making new connections and our friend lists grow.
But it doesn’t seem to be like it used to be. People don’t seem to connect with each other as much or follow each other’s work.
I keep trying to relate Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice to this phenomenon. It’s not a perfect fit, but I think there are some things to consider about this.
The paradox of choice is that something that should make us feel happy and fulfilled (having great flexibility of choices in our lives) often leads to stress and anxiety. There’s a number of reasons for this:
- too many options makes the act of making a decision more of picking from a dizzying list of options rather than selecting from a few alternatives that you can easily understand and research
- analysis-paralysis sets in: how do I spend my time with so much information being thrown at me?
- when something that seemed fun becomes work, we might tend to do it less
I think some people abandon social media services because they take work to keep up with, especially if you try to keep track of people that you’ve never physically met them. I also think that, after awhile, as you follow too many people, the number of links and updates shared by other people just feel overwhelming and we decide to not bother following them at all for long periods of time. This would be similar to the feeling you have when you check your E-Mail inbox in the morning and find 500 E-Mails.
There’s also the problem of offering that are just too similar. There are literally hundreds of social media blogs out there, as an example. But which ones do you follow? You try to settle down with a handful of blogs, but then you hear about another good one, so you subscribe to it and… then you have to rationalize again.
As for all of the links that are shared by Twitter, there’s a definite downside to the URL shorteners like bit.ly. They do save characters when you are Tweeting, but they give no clue as to the actual website that the link is to, so then it becomes a case of who or what do you trust? How do you pick and choose? Can you trust what the Twitter user puts in for text or will it turn out to be crap or an affiliate link or…
Also, the fact that some people Tweet so many links, @replies, and other updates that you don’t know if the Tweets you see now are better than, or worse than, older Tweets. Tweets aren’t like blog posts that appear in your RSS reader: they tend to disappear more quickly.
So, with all of these factors, does it seem to make a bit more sense as to why people might not be clicking on links or otherwise monitoring their social media websites as much as they used to?
This post is a bit off the cuff, so it probably needs so more thought and work, but I think there’s some truth to it.
What do you think? Do you think the paradox of choice is causing people to turn away, in degrees, from social media? Is the flexibility killing the medium? Or is this just the jumbled musings of a partially awake blogger?
remarkablogger:
I know for myself, I've simply stopped using 90% of the social networks I've signed up to. I pretty much stick with Twitter, Facebook, Redux, and LinkedIn (barely). For me, it's all about relationship and reputation when it comes to links. There some people I will retweet without even looking at what they were linking to because I trust them.
Twitter is the highest traffic referrer to my blog after Headway and Google, and others I've spoken to say Twitter sends them a lot of traffic through tweeting and retweeting links. Not trying to put you on the spot here, but you don't really cite a source to back up this downward trend you mention, or say what that observation is based on—just because you're clicking on fewer links doesn't mean anyone else is clicking on fewer links. That would be like me thinking nobody watches TV anymore because I don't.
If I missed something about that, or I'm just not really getting it, let me know.
Definitely the “paradox of choice” comes into play. Very few people (compared to the general population of non-geeks and non-marketers) have the ability and knowledge to manage multiple social media accounts with any effectiveness because of the knowledge required.
Thanks for the thought-provoking post!
20 January 2010, 9:38 pmNathan Hangen:
My clicks are up…with number of followers that hasn't increased by more than 20% over the last few months. I think a lot of it has to do with where you spend your time. I'm on Twitter all the time, but rarely anywhere else, and as such…those profiles show it.
20 January 2010, 9:45 pmIan M Rountree:
There's an element of truth here. Social media as a concept has worn off its shiny coat over the last year of overexposure. The question is not whether certain volumes of people will give it up and go back to their lives as usual – but whether that mass constitutes a nova (a natural ejection of refuse mass) or a supernova (a critical ejection of mass resulting in collapse).
Personally, I think it's the former, mostly because some new, nearby star will suck up the ejects, and the overall view of the landscape will remain the same to anyone not already near enough to tell the difference between the shrinking star and its rising, younger twin.
20 January 2010, 9:47 pmLiane:
Makes me remember the term “email bankruptcy” wherein you start to forget an email account that you can keep up with because of the hundreds of unread messages. Oh, you mentioned that too.
The term is just being 'overwhelmed'. Even with the rise of rss aggregators and of course social media aggregators too, it's just hard to keep up with so much. It's not like you can have an extesion of 24 hours afterall.
20 January 2010, 9:58 pmAlysson:
I would tend to agree with you for the most part. I am inundated with so many links via Twitter that I find myself ignoring most everything that isn't brought to my attention specifically or doesn't come from a pool of very specific people with whom I've built some rapport and trust.
The only exception to that is if I see the same thing being shared several times. I might trust one person implicitly and be more likely to believe that their endorsement or recommendation…thus following the link without much thought. But, if a link is shared by multiple people with whom I have a modicum of trust and rapport, I'm just as likely to click on the link as I would be if shared by one person for whom I have the utmost trust.
I liken it to a vetting process of sorts. If my best friend suggests I go out with a guy, I may trust her judgment alone and agree. Whereas if someone I don't know as well suggests I go out with the same guy, I might not. If several people were to suggest I go out with him – even if I don't know them as well – I'd be more likely to trust their collective judgment agree. It will be interesting to see how this trend ultimately plays out as the shine begins to wear off our social web toys and they become as common place in our day-to-day lives as e-mail and cell phones.
20 January 2010, 10:03 pmDebbie Ferm:
I get what you are saying here, personally. Sometimes on twitter there is just so much coming at me that I think I just quit processing it. At that point, you don't really absorb anything and you quit clicking. Maybe that's what's happening with you. I think I need to limit myself to 10 minutes three times a day and call it good.
20 January 2010, 10:07 pmCam Gleeson:
I agree with remarkablogger's comment about trimming back social media to the basic ones. The reason is the for the relationship he talks about and the time effort point you raised. I think in the early days you tend to experiment a lot, I certainly did, now I am past the experimentation phase and a more interested in the return on effort.
As for the paradox of choice, choice implies understanding. By that I mean if you are presented with choices you excited if you understand benefits and how to's etc of each one, but if you don't then choice becomes a too all too hard. The fear of making the wrong choice etc. BTW this could also be my mid -afternoon ramble as well.
20 January 2010, 11:05 pmMark Dykeman:
Fair point Michael. Again, it's primarily based on my own experience. I track how many people click the bit.ly links that I share and there do seem to be fewer clicks per shared link. However, when I've asked this question previously via Twitter, I had five people respond and they said the numbers were other unchanged or lower. I'll have to add this into the post.
It's a theory without any hard research or evidence.
21 January 2010, 4:23 amMark Dykeman:
It would certainly make sense that if you “work” Twitter by engaging people and spending time curating your content that you'll get more clicks. Thanks for the insight.
21 January 2010, 4:25 amMark Dykeman:
I struggled with this post and this idea because originally The Paradox of Choice seemed, intuitively, to explain some of the things that I was seeing on Twitter in terms of people clicking on my links. There's no doubt that Twitter isn't the shiny new toy that it once was, especially for the early to mid stage adopters, and that may have some impact. At the same time, though, the only real alternatives that I see for the sharing of links and information that you see in Twitter are:
1. FriendFeed – which is really an extension of Twitter, etc. and in fact republishes much of the same content
2. Facebook – more and more links seem to be shared here, although I have no proof of it
3. RSS feeds
4. E-Mail (but it doesn't have the same public element as Twitter)
Does that make sense?
21 January 2010, 4:34 amMark Dykeman:
You're right about being overwhelmed. That's a significant factor in The Paradox of Choice, where instead of being to choose from a small set of options, you have to pick from a large list without being able to adequately research all options.
21 January 2010, 4:51 amMark Dykeman:
You're definitely on to something about the “vetting process”, which is a form of recommendation. It allows you to make an informed choice, as long as you can trust all of the people who are RTing the link. It's social proof.
The one comment I'd make, as I've indicated in the post, is that another problem is even seeing all of the links. Something may get RTed a lot, but technically it's possible to miss it if you're not looking at the right time.
21 January 2010, 4:56 amMark Dykeman:
I honestly don't try to track everything because I know there's too much to go through. Twitter lists help to filter stuff if I want to see every single thing someone's Tweeting, as does clicking on their profile and reading through their Tweets individually. But really, is it worth the effort? I dunno. Keyword searches could be helpful to filter, too.
21 January 2010, 4:58 amMark Dykeman:
Yes, exactly! Choice implies understanding! It's hard to understand everything (or even most things) within a Twitter stream of any size.
21 January 2010, 4:59 amremarkablogger:
“Hard” research is um… hard to come by in the world of social media, but I
21 January 2010, 5:17 amwas just curious about the basis for your personal observation. Thanks for
enlightening me on that. Great post.
Sarge:
Ding Ding. There are always people around some social media places. I think it all depends on what you do with your time. If you spend all your time on twitter then that's where you'll make the most impact.
I think people have been moving from place to place and are starting to settle down where they feel comfortable now. But there are always going to be new people coming up in other places which aren't involved in the networks we're in currently. New people that might be interested in what we have to say and offer.
21 January 2010, 5:50 amGlen Allsopp:
What sites like Twitter have done is completely change how the web operates. Posts I write now may have gotten 50 backlinks in the past…now I'll get 50 tweets. Tweets that are nofollow so Google don't follow them (as verified in a video by Matt Cutts, yesterday). I think this alone is changing a lot of things.
There's a rush of people coming online and trying out every single service, it's just important that we stick to the ones which acually help us personally. Otherwise, as you say, overload and too many choices kick in.
- Glen
21 January 2010, 5:57 amMark Dykeman:
Excellent point about the NoFollow nature of Tweets/RTs, Glen.
If the stats are true and Twitter isn't adding users as quickly as it was in the past, we may now be in a period of consolidation anyway and people who tried Twitter might not like it enough to stay.
21 January 2010, 7:13 amlucythorpe:
I may be missing a trick here but does everyone re-tweet stuff they haven't opened ? Can someone explain that to me. I thought the idea was to share stuff you liked because you'd read it ?
21 January 2010, 7:58 amMark Dykeman:
Lucy, that's an excellent point. I have no proof, but I believe that most people do read content before they RT it. However, there are some individuals who might not. There are also automated Twitter accounts that automatically RT stuff based on keywords or whatever accounts that they follow, so presumably the link gets Tweeted without being read. There are about 7 Twitter accounts that seem to Tweet my stuff automatically and I have no idea who set them up.
21 January 2010, 8:20 amThe Paradox and the Detox « Selaphor:
[...] I keep trying to relate Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice to this phenomenon. It’s not a perfect fit, but I think there are some things to consider about this.The paradox of choice is that something that should make us feel happy and fulfilled (having great flexibility of choices in our lives) often leads to stress and anxiety. [Via A simple theory on why social media is losing its mojo | Broadcasting Brain - different thoughts abo...] [...]
21 January 2010, 11:49 amWalter:
Your points are valid and I'm also experiencing the same. I never try to absorb them all, I only look for quality (the one's that has human elements). When I find one, I keep it.
21 January 2010, 6:45 pmMark Dykeman:
And how do you determine if something has quality, Walter?
21 January 2010, 6:50 pm39clues:
I definitely have experienced this.
I started out about a month and a half ago using Twitter full time. At first, it was really great; I was meeting and connecting with tons of new people, having productive conservations, and I got to know everyone who I followed really well.
Now, I can testify that it nothing like that now. Because my followers have grown a lot (to nearly 400 now), and I look at everyone who follows me and follow anyone who seems interesting, I am now up to following 450 followers, and it's a big mess.
I mainly use FriendFeed to track since not nearly as many people are on there.
Although I actually am not in many social networking sites, I agree that as the volume increases, everyone changes drastically for the worst. Thanks!
21 January 2010, 9:02 pmMonty Loree:
Good post… I set up my own redirect site to brand and track clicks … I've sent out 100+ links and have gotten maybe 15 clicks.
21 January 2010, 9:21 pmThere is alot of desensitization going on with social media, however, it's still good if you give it time and develop relationships.
Mark Dykeman:
Interesting to note that you are using FriendFeed to track people. Have you tried the lists feature in Twitter? It can help make things easier to manage.
22 January 2010, 6:08 amMark Dykeman:
How often do you send out links? That could be a issue as well. Too many links in a short period of time invokes the law of diminishing returns, I think.
22 January 2010, 6:09 am39clues:
I've never really used lists to track people. The reason for this is that you have to manually add each person you want for your list. With FriendFeed, you can just click a button and it does it for you. It's also easier to access on FriendFeed's homepage than the lists, which you have to click on. It tracks all the Social Networking sites (not just Twitter), so it's easier in that way. As well as most of the serious people who I would want to follow are on FriendFeed, which cuts out the fat in a way.
22 January 2010, 2:49 pmgliss:
Quality over Quantity. Substance over Hype. We're now getting burned out by quantity and hype. It means we need to remember we are humans and do things on a human scale, which is obviously, not expecting to have a party with 15,000 of our close personal friends.
22 January 2010, 3:25 pmMark Dykeman:
I don't know if I would have thought of it as a huge party, but I think I can appreciate the analogy if I assume I'm at a huge party and I only know three people there.
22 January 2010, 8:11 pmDenny McCorkle:
Mark,
I agree about the sometimes reluctance to click a hidden link (unless from a trusted blogger or tweeter). I always try to indicate the source of my tweets (sometimes in abbreviated form). This way time is not wasted on click thru to a source that was previously read. @TweetRightBrain
23 January 2010, 12:43 amMark Dykeman:
I also try to provide context – I think it's a good idea.
23 January 2010, 5:14 amladygbd:
After investing months of reading and responding to tweets and blogs, I am pondering “why should I continue tweeting?”
Being on twitter feels akin to the noise I imagine would come from a room full of people, conversing loudly on their blue tooth mobile phones, hoping that someone else in the room will laugh, repeat or object to their converstation.
Perhaps I lack the measure of narcissm required for a fulfilling twitter experience?
23 January 2010, 3:30 pmMark Dykeman:
Hello and welcome, @ladygbd!
A couple of thoughts come to mind as I read your comment:
1. You mention both Tweets and blogs, but it seems like you're only questioning Twitter. Does that mean you're getting value from blogs, then?
2. Your description of Twitter is one that I haven't read before. Yes, it can certainly seem to be as you have described, although I think the image works better without the mobile phones.
3. As for the “narcissism” comment: that's one way to approach Twitter. Another is to use it as a never-ending stream of information, of which only a small percentage is indispensable and a larger percentage is interesting. Yet another way is to use it to keep in touch with people (other Twitter users). And, on top of that, you can use it for advocacy and spreading ideas. It's all that and it depends on who you attempt to engage and how you attempt to engage them. There are a number of notable people in the non-profit sector who use Twitter to try to advance the causes they support. That's how I look at it.
4. I also appreciate that you're approaching Twitter with a critical eye instead of being a sheep.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
23 January 2010, 5:41 pmmarkdykeman:
Test comment for new commenting system.
23 January 2010, 8:31 pmsharonvak:
It’s impossible to chime in on this conversation with some blanket statements, assuming they apply to everyone. We’re dealing with several different generations here who view social media participation as completely different experiences.
When it comes to sharing links and info, generations older than Gen Y feel they’re contributing to the community. They may see it as a virtual marketplace of ideas and discussion.
Gen Y’s tend to tweet about themselves, their interests, and their happenings.
In the end only one thing matters: feedback. No matter who you are, you love feedback. Soon enough, users will be discouraged to post links, etc. because they’ll realize/think “is anyone actually reading this?” We’ve noticed this most with Gen Y’s, who dropped Twitter off their radar a long time ago–they weren’t getting any attention/feedback.
Facebook has done a spectacular job in fostering the need for feedback.
It’s survival of the fittest–what will Twitter do to give people the positive attention and credit they need to keep sharing?
24 January 2010, 4:29 pmmarkdykeman:
@sharonvak – Yes, I’ve heard the same comments about the ways that different generations share links and about feedback. I suppose this does fit into the “relevance” part of wading through mountains of shared links. People of a certain generation may be more attracted to some types of content than other kinds of content, but that also holds true for a series of demographic characteristics, or filters, if you will.
Interesting comments about Gen Y – what’s the source of your information about Gen Ys on Twitter? I hadn’t heard that they were abandoning Twitter.
I don’t know what Twitter can do to encourage people to give feedback to other people unless they radically re-engineer the product. It’s a dead simple tool at heart.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
24 January 2010, 8:34 pmsharonvak:
@markdykeman-
Thanks for checking out my comment
.
I wrote a blog (CNET) last year about Gen Y’s Twitter activity, citing a Pace University study: “only 22 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds use Twitter, while 99 percent have profiles on social networks.” Interesting to see how these numbers have changed since then.
You’re right– Twitter would have to change a LOT to give users the satisfaction that Facebook delivers.
If you’re interested, my blog post is here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10265060-2.html
24 January 2010, 9:06 pmmarkdykeman:
@sharonvak – I think I see where you’re coming from in your article: a generation used to sharing photos and images might find Twitter restrictive. That’s a P.O.V. that I hadn’t considered before. However, there’s a professional/business aspect to Twitter that provides a different twist on social media communication.
24 January 2010, 9:42 pmMaybe Every Thought Aggregates | Broadcasting Brain - different thoughts about thinking differently:
[...] attention is scarce and we want to focus on relevant content with as little effort as possible. In a world where we can go numb from exposure to so many choices of opinion, content, and topic, we’ve got to make it easy, right? Formula provides the road [...]
26 January 2010, 8:18 am