23 Mar Facebook Intends to Further Lower Reach? Will the Hashtag Disappear from Twitter? | Social You Should Know
According to AdWeek, Facebook wants to “force” brands to spend more; Twitter’s head of news is suggesting that things like hashtags and @replies are “arcane”; and new research from Pew Internet predicts the web in 2025, in this week’s Social You Should Know.
Can Facebook Force Brands to Pay?
Valleywag, and later Adweek, have suggested that Facebook is “in the process of” slashing “organic page reach down to 1 to 2 percent. Our research here at Ignite Social Media finds similar results, with organic reach down dramatically. We are now routinely seeing organic reach under 3%. The mistake of these articles in my view: That advertising on a Facebook page with such low reach may not make any sense. Facebook pages with 16% organic reach complementing the paid reach was a strong value proposition. At 3%? We should be reevaluating our ad budgets, not just increasing them.
Might Twitter Kill the Hashtag?
Vivian Schiller, head of news at Twitter, said this week that the hashtag and @replies are “arcane” and may be confusing to newer users. The theory, since then, is that eventually one will still type @username to message someone, but that it will show that user’s name instead, as it does on Facebook. And hashtags may still result in a bold and clickable link, but the # itself would disappear. Making these actions part of Twitter’s overall experience would be consistent with how Twitter put RTs into the system itself. It seems like the alpha version of a new Twitter app on Android is already not showing @replies.
Digital Life in 2025: About People, Info, Social
The well respected Pew Research Internet Project has predicted digital life in 2025 and social media is a powerful part of it. With a global, nearly invisible set of Internets, people will continue to share their thoughts and opinions widely. In fact, it will be “so effortlessly interwoven into daily life that it will become invisible, flowing like electricity.” To me, that suggests that social media marketers who know how to create, manage and leverage those social shares will be as important as ever.
And finally, it what may be another sign of what the future looks like for all of us, 30% of the media content consumed by millennials is now UGC. And millennials trust it 50% more than TV, newspapers and magazines. Hmm…
