1.8 Social Media Innovations

Innovation around traditional media was generally centered around improvements in the physical devices that brought us the content. Radios got smaller, and television screens got bigger. New buttons were added to remote controls, and cable TV systems gave us many more options and shows to watch that mostly weren’t of much interest. But besides the evolution from SD television broadcasts (4 × 3 screens and 480 × 560 pixels → HDTV → 4K and 8K UHDTV, 16 × 9 aspect ratio, and WAY more pixels than the old screens) to streaming services, the way in which we interact with traditional media hasn’t changed much over the last 75 years.

The same is not true of social media platforms. Over the years, since MySpace and Facebook began recruiting users, the platforms have multiplied, and all have added features and services to pull us in for more minutes a day. They also each employ a variety of tactics to get us to create more content for them. Instagram was born by providing easy-to-use smartphone camera and image filters to make even the most pedestrian photos look “cool” and unique. Facebook and others have enabled sharing functions that make it easy for users to create quizzes and surveys and games that enable social sharing and a “Ponzi-like scheme” where friends of friends pile on and create a compounding of interest in our posts.

Indeed, the proliferation of different platforms now makes it possible for us to have an entire, 360-degree, multifaceted conversation about anything using the pantheon of social media platforms. Here is one of my favorite social media slides. It succinctly presents many platforms’ focus and application by way of our complicated relationship to the common cookie.

And it’s not just the variety of platforms that are available for the user and the marketer. Today, each platform has its own set of user notification tools and various tag functions that allow the system to perpetually increase the reach of posts and comments and likes. Each system also has its own “Ad Manager” and “Analytical Tools” that marketers use to plan and execute their social media campaigns.

After all, what user doesn’t want to see what post they were just tagged in? (And what marketer won’t pay for placement next to organic content that is all about their brand or category?) Most platforms have added some type of livestream video functions that require immediate attention since the content won’t be available later. These tactics give us the FOMO itch that pulls us back onto our phones again and again.

In these, and in dozens of other ways, social platforms are adding “sticky” features that make it easy to keep the app open and check it every time our phone comes out of our pocket. (Which, according to Asurion, occurs 96 times a day. That’s once every 10 minutes.) That’s a 20 percent daily increase from a similar survey conducted by Asurion two years ago. The scariest part is that 18- to 24-year-olds check their phones twice as much as the national average. That’s 200 times a day. Or about once every 5 minutes that they are awake.1