(Source: MIRS.news, Published 01/22/2024) As the 2024 presidential race settles into a repeat of 2020, the landscape of social media has fractured and spread users across a larger space making messaging more competitive and difficult.
Many academics studying social media have seen the spreading of users across various social media sites. Tiktok, X formerly known as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mastadon, Threads, YouTube, Rumble, TruthSocial, Snapchat, Reddit, Blue Sky and Neighbors, have seen changing usership over the past four years.
"The term 'alternative social media' has really risen in prominence over the past couple of years because of this fragmentation," said Scott Cowley, associate professor of marketing at Western Michigan University.
Cowley said there have been several disruptions as of late that have drastically changed the landscape, such as the rise in prominence of TikTok and Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. The Twitter change and the exodus of advertisers changed the way other social media functions and there is a lot of bubbles forming around political ideologies.
However, while all the alternative social media sites had their rise and pulled some communities, the amount of people that ended up staying was about 1 percent.
"All of them had their moment of glory when they had tons and tons of signups but retention seems to be a huge issue for all of them," Cowley said.
He said it is tough to get everyone to move, but the one thing that can help is the almighty dollar.
Many of the companies pay celebrities and influencers for their creative content that drives eyes and users to settle in their site.
Cowley said those social media platforms were currently finding that it isn't practical to pay influencers, but just let them share the advertising revenue.
"It'll be interesting to see what happens when nobody is directly paying creators and creators are purely making money off ad revenue on those platforms because then we'll get to see where the creators themselves want to spend their time or if they're even going to spend their time on social media, doing those same things," he said.
He said all the upheaval in social media has ultimately equated to fewer users, making it more difficult for people, like politicians, who are looking to reach a wider audience than four years ago. Now, those politicians would not just have to travel to physical cities, but the digital ones, as well.
"The silver lining in that is that politicians will be on a bit of an even playing field because everyone's going to be hit by those trends," Cowley said.
He said there could be a shift to all former trusted platforms and news outlets to be the ones that that politicians use to reach a mainstream audience and actually make some news.
"It comes to winning over the people who are persuadable, which is what a lot of politicians are trying to figure out. How do we get people who are actually open to changing their minds and changing their loyalties then these dominant social platforms, some of them are not nearly as attractive as what as they used to be," he said.
Cowley said one of the places that could be turned to, would be something like the traditional public relations firms, like Resch Strategies. Founder and president Matt Resch said he sees that fracturing, which has made everything on the platforms more competitive, driving marketers and public relations back to its roots.
"Getting someone to latch onto a public policy ad or a post or something like that and take some sort of concrete action is just becoming challenging because the competition out there for the viewers eyes and clicks is getting so much more fierce," Resch said.
He said what he has seen from the political sphere isn't that the politicians are using social media to go after the wider constituency, but are using it to mobilize their base in bouts of what he called "talking-to-my-own-side-ism."
"It just feels like state lawmakers are going on there and posting things that really only their true hardcore believers would agree with and that's really what they are looking for, they're looking for those folks to agree with them," he said.
He said it was important to remember that social media and real life were not mutually exclusive and just because something was being screamed about on Twitter or Facebook didn't mean it was as major as it looked.
"I think a lot of times we're seeing that the members of the Legislature and political campaigns get caught up in winning the tweet battle of the day, and not realizing the big picture, that's not really reaching people, and very few people are actually seeing what it is that you're talking about," he said.
He pointed out that it wasn't just social media, but all the legacy media that needed attention during campaigns, paralleling what Cowley said.
"I think there is still a need to again understand your audience and understand where your audience is and then make sure that you're tailoring your message to whatever platform that is," Resch said.
That message, even though it can be targeted, is not instantaneous and is not a one-shot deal, he said.
"There's still that element that goes in any political campaign of persistence, consistency, and really driving a message home many, many times before people take an action," he said.
That isn't to detract from the power of social media that still exists for those people on the various platforms.
"It's where people are hanging out. Depending on who your target audience is, there's a vast number of people out here that just don't watch TV anymore," Resch said.
The power of social media was something Marisa Smith, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, said hasn't diminished, and has only gotten more powerful through echo chambering information.
Smith said as more and more people used social media for finding news and other information, the information they feel is important has shifted because they are having their ideas reinforced by the information they are getting.
She said that doesn't mean people aren't getting information, but social media makes it easier to ignore and provides information, whether real or not, that allows them to maintain those beliefs or stances.
Regardless of what digital city people reside in, there is a message echoing through that can influence what they believe the most important issues are. If someone is told over and over again that there is a high crime rate, they will want to elect someone who is tough on crime.
She said the fracturing of social media is real, but the power is still pertinent.
"I just don't necessarily think it diminishes the overall impact of it because for those who are on social media, it does have the ability to sway how they believe and how they think," Smith said.
The power lies within the communities talking to each other. Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, said she, too, has seen the fracturing of social media.
"You're searching for that connection through these platforms, through these wider and dispersed networks. And if there's one clear place where they are, then you can go to that place. But if it becomes less clear where they are, then you're kind of spreading out and trying to find where those connections are again," Peterson-Salahuddin said.
She said as the communities and social media fractured there was a "calibration" that happened for people to find the community they wanted to belong to and those calibrations could fracture along age or culture or any number of factors.
"As we spread out more and more, people are recalibrating, that doesn't mean that they're not still in those old places. They're just, you know, moving and shifting things around," she said.
