There's a quiet pull-back happening on social media

50% of consumers will abandon or significantly limit their interactions with social media by 2025.

That's a prediction Gartner made in December 2023, citing users perceptions that the quality and value of content on social media is decaying. 

I'm a little surprised this barely made a blip in marketing circles, but the prediction? Not so shocking.

User behavior on social media is definitely changing. I'm one of those people. Many of my friends have either pulled back or entirely deleted apps, some years ago.

In the business spaces I'm in, new founders are actively looking for ways to build without starting business social accounts. 

Spend a few minutes googling, and you'll find numerous articles and Reddit threads with a host of reasons users, particularly Gen Z and Millennials, are reevaluating their relationship to their social apps:

• Platform disinvestment in fact-checking and comment moderation

  
  

• Disinformation and misinformation

  
  

• Right wing groups making platforms more unsafe for women, LGBTQ, and people of color

  
  

• Bots that flood the comments

  
  

• AI slop choking the feed

  
  

• Shadowbans

  
  

• Creator burnout

  
  

• A growing fatigue with social performance and lack of authenticity

And then there's this to contend with.

And that's before we even talk about the mental and emotional toll that health professionals have been sounding the alarm on for years. 

As I've been researching this trend, what did surprise me was a comment one interview subject made about the need to connect with her audience, despite how much she wanted to get off of social media: "How else would I get in touch with them?"

This is my biggest concern for women in who rely on social media to do business today. We're so dependent on it to talk to our audiences that we've forgotten how to communicate without it. 

That's a big problem.

If you can't reach your fans without an app, there are holes in your marketing strategy. There are missing stairs in your owned channel solutions.

And you're probably spending more time and money than you need to trying to reach your audience with each post. 

Marketers need to be thinking about how social disengagement will impact ROI in the future, and how we'll maintain or re-gain relationships with the customers who've already pulled back or left the platforms. 

And if you're seeing yourself in that commenter? Don't panic. 

Get in touch. I specialize in helping businesses reclaim their time, their money, and their audience from social channels.