1.3 The Basic Technology of Social Media Platforms

To understand how social media platforms are such effective marketing tools, we should take a peek at exactly what is happening behind the screens that keeps all the media content flowing and sponsored ads reaching the right people at the right time.

It’s probably worth remembering that before the digital age, all media was both location and time-based. This means that once the message—the newspaper, magazine, movie, radio program, and so on—was created and distributed, its impact was limited to those that “received” it. And once it was gone, it was gone. Other than a few specialized libraries and archives that were not just virtually but also literally inaccessible to consumers, most analog media content was produced, consumed at a specific time and place, and then it was gone. Today, digital content and stories can circulate widely and find new audiences years after they were originally published.

Networked, IP addressable computers (the internet) and the way computers store and index information digitally (files, photos, and videos as bits and bytes of data) changed all that. Of course, using cell phone and wireless internet technology to access those files from almost anywhere on the planet didn’t hurt either. And those changes—content moving from analog to digital and from wired to wireless distribution—is what makes social media platforms possible.

All of this archiving, finding, tagging, sharing, and retrieving is only possible thanks to the supercomputers we carry around in our pockets (smartphones) and the massive storage and computing power found at server farms, which hold and index all this data. In simplest terms, social media platforms are individual-account-based, hyper-indexed data storage networks. These databases hold all the posts (content) we upload, along with all the information connected to that content: who has seen it, the comments on it, where it was shared to and from, the time it spent on users’ screens, and the number of clicks and likes it has received. This data can then be searched and retrieved through any number of different connections to the content, creating a highly detailed mapped network of both users and content—giving marketers a veritable gold mine of information about potential customers, purchase intent, and more.

With this digital index of content, users, and potential advertisers, the social media platforms can (and do) monitor what content is appealing to which audiences and what content (this refers to both native and advertising content) the algorithms believe should be “served up” to each individual user to keep them scrolling, engaging, and clicking on the site for the most time possible. And that is each social media company’s ultimate goal: to provide a positive user experience that maximizes time on platform and content engagement so they can sell that user’s attention to the highest bidder.

Compare this customized, targeted, dynamic media and advertising experience of social platforms to that of traditional media, and the differences are clear. Television, radio, print, outdoor (billboards and transit ads) are all static, one-way messages that may (but likely will not) enjoy any add-on reach through conversations. While television was the gold standard of advertising effectiveness for decades, social platforms that can deliver targeted, interactive, and friend-endorsed video messages will win the day every time for advertising results and, increasingly, viewership totals. In short, we have traded in our big, dumb TV screens for small, smart screens, and it doesn’t look like there is any way back.