The state of social media depends very much on the perspective you take. Financially speaking, it’s in rude health. WARC predicts that brands will spend $300bn on the channel in 2026, which would represent something like a quarter of global advertising expenditure. It’s no less prevalent than it was, either. According to Ofcom, 60% of news consumption now takes place on ‘online intermediaries’, which includes social media platforms, as well as online news aggregators.
And yet…
A great many people who post or lurk on social media would argue that it’s passed it’s peak. There’s no longer one platform that sets the agenda in the same way that Twitter did in the years before Elon Musk acquired it, for example. And public feeds have increasingly become colonised with video content from professional (or aspiring) creators. There isn’t much data to quantify that social media has become less social, but in 2023, Instagram’s Adam Mosseri seemed to confirm in an interview, when he said: ‘Your friends don’t post that much to feed’.
Against this backdrop, we chatted with Beth Thomas and Michael Corcoran, a former campaign operations manager at TikTok and the head of social at Ryanair, respectively, who have co-founded a new consultancy called Slice Social.
Listen to find out whether ‘enshittification’ has irreparably worsened social media, how marketers can make the channel pay, and which brands Thomas and Corcoran are doing it right (and neither of them say Duolingo, which makes a nice change).
