Social Media Channel Management

MATT:

All right. So, before we tackle social media channel management, Greg, we have to share a little history of early social media channels.

Early Social Media Channels

What I think is interesting about the history is that there used to be distinctive categories of social media, and those distinctions are being eliminated or adopted by every other platform.

GREG:

I think the greatest example that we’ve seen recently is TikTok, which has forced Instagram to launch Reels and YouTube to launch Shorts.

And before that, Snapchat had everyone ripping off their Stories idea.

So, if you’ve got a really cool feature, you’ve got about a 3‐week head start on your competitors, who are going to try to knock it off.

Social Networks

MATT:

One of the first categories was a social network, which I think would be more defined by building networks of people.

Facebook and LinkedIn are the two big ones. I think it’s interesting that when you chart the growth of both, LinkedIn has a slow, steady increase over the years, where Facebook had huge growth, and now seems to be in decline.

Video Sharing

GREG:

Another category was the video‐sharing site. And in the early days, that meant YouTube and Vimeo.

This is why some people still think Facebook and YouTube are in different categories. Well, they were until Facebook zigged. And even LinkedIn now says, “We have video too.”

Microblogging

MATT:

The next category was microblogging. The big examples were Twitter and Tumblr.

Twitter started out with a limit of 140 characters of text. Well, now I can upload video. I can upload images. And Twitter has doubled the character limit for tweets from 140 to 280. So, this is a great example of changing functionality to accommodate what people want to do.

Photo Sharing

GREG:

Then there’s the photo‐sharing category. I used Flicker extensively when I was promoting the Search Engine Strategies conferences.

And then Flickr added short videos, but their user base revolted. “No, we’re for photo sharing, not video sharing.”

So, it is amazing to watch what’s going on in Instagram now because they started off as a square photo sharing app. But now over 45 percent of Instagram accounts like, comment on, or share Reels at least once a week.

Blogs

MATT:

And you mentioned earlier that blogs were considered a category of social media. And when WordPress came out in 2003, I was at a digital agency and the bread and butter of the company was building websites.

And when I saw WordPress come out, I was taking it and showing it to people. I said, “This is going to change everything.” And today, 40 percent of the billions of websites on the Internet are on WordPress.

Platform Convergence

GREG:

Now, that brings us to the blender. Is short‐form video just a feature? Is it a category? The answer is: “It depends.”

That means any good social media marketer needs to pay a little bit of attention to the lessons of history because, okay, maybe it doesn’t repeat itself, but things come back again and again that seem awfully familiar. So, there are lessons you can learn, even if they aren’t exact.

So, the poster child for evolving their definition of who they are and what they’re about is Facebook. And some of that was forced on them.

MATT:

Facebook’s first crisis was in 2012, when it was just a desktop application. And the iPhone was turning everything into a mobile first world. And Facebook decided to pivot and become a “mobile first company.”

GREG:

Then, in 2015, Facebook decided to pivot and become a “video first company.”

MATT:

In 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta Platforms.

GREG:

And in February 2022, following the greatest single‐day stock drop in recorded history, Mark Zuckerberg, the co‐founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta Platforms, announced the company’s focus would shift to growing short‐form video.