Social Network Fatigue: Part 2
Every new advertising format enjoys a honeymoon period where response rates are comparatively high. As the format becomes widely exploited by marketers, consumers adopt filtering techniques and response rates drop - aka advertising fatigue. As discussed in Part 1 of this post, social networking is akin to a new advertising format in that it enables us to broadcast our lives out to our personal networks. Also similar to a new ad format, this personal advertising is showing signs of fatigue. We’re developing new filters for our friends.
Which gets at the long-term reality of the larger social media ecosystem. The growth of the social networks and the applications that run on top of them are tied directly to the delicate health of the weak ties that underpin them. What happens when you fatigue these ties? Filtering techniques improve and response rates drop. This is not in the best interest of anybody in the ecosystem yet, through a tragedy of the commons, it has happened to every ad format prior and will invariably happen here. The only question is to what degree it will happen. This is a key question for the next crop of social applications.
Will we really filter our own friends? Absolutely. My ability to aggressively message a given tie in my social graph is directly proportional to the strength of that tie. Weak ties will quickly collapse when overused whereas stronger ties can endure quite a bit more abuse. Message value plays a strong role of course. Even if someone in my social graph is sending out a high frequency of material, if it is of correspondingly high value, I’m unlikely to filter them. But, when the signal to noise ratio inverts, friend becomes spammer and badness ensues. Information becomes information pollution. Like avoiding friendly fire on the battlefield, we will filter out ‘friendly spam’ and the friends who fire it and/or just tire of or quit the platforms that don’t give us enough control over the equation.
Facebook recognized this early on and has gradually instituted a number of policies over time aimed at dialing up message value and dialing down friendly spam by curtailing the messaging capabilities of Facebook applications. Twitter, on the other hand, seems to have been caught a little flat footed by its first message-heavy game application. They would be well advised to get out in front of it fast. In addition to spam-happy game developers, marketers are hard at work on the attention arbitrage potential of social networking with little a care as to what it means for the user or their personal relationships. It is up to the platform holders to create and vigilantly maintain a reasonable balance between business growth and user convenience. Facebook is clearly ahead in this regard as evidenced by its user retention numbers.
What does this mean for those building or investing in social applications? I think it means that the short-term gold rush on artificial, spam-driven virality is coming to a close. In an attention economy spam is inflationary and, one way or another, will be dealt with. To grow an application in the coming period therefore will be a function of strong user value, tight platform integration, marketing, and aggressive funnel optimization. The viral channels in social media are still extremely powerful. But, out of necessity, will be more tightly regulated going forward. The space is growing up. The next generation of successful social apps will be those that map well to this new reality.
-Shanti
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