Do Digital Marketers Hate Personal Social Media?

Are you a digital marketer? Is social media a big chunk of your workload? Let me ask you this, do you still enjoy social media in your personal life? Or has work completely ruined social media for you?

Social Media is a hot topic lately with more and more people making the move away from it, or lowering their usage. With this in mind, an interesting question comes to mind when you consider social media in a work sense versus social media in a personal sense! Having looked at some of the opinions floating around on online communities and boards, it’s fair to say that a lot of digital marketers have lost a love for social media outside of the workplace!

Most people think of social media as an escape from our day to day lives, somewhere we can go to scroll endlessly and get lost in a digital space, but for a lot of digital marketers that sense of escape has been ruined. Rather than scrolling through content and enjoying it, we end up analysing the content, looking at engagement and thinking with our ‘work’ brains. It also ruins the fun of posting on personal social media accounts. Instead of throwing up an Instagram picture because we like it, we start to question the purpose of the post, the filters we use, the time we post and what way it will portray us as a person.

If you feel the same, and you think the fun has been stolen from social media, you surely find it hard to take any enjoyment from your work when social media is involved? How do you deal with being a marketer on social media channels when they no longer serve a purpose in your personal life?

Our advice is to go back to basics, and remind yourself what VALUE social media brings to your company or brand. Whether it’s to gain traffic to your website, to interact with your customers, increase or even facilitate sales, to advertise or to increase reach, social media is a valuable asset for any business, and reminding ourselves of that can sometimes reignite the drive to deliver top quality social media content after losing the personal love for it.

As we’ve all probably seen or heard now, Instagram recently removed the visibility of the number of likes on posts. While we can see how many likes our own posts get, we cannot see the likes of those that we follow! The initial reaction to this online, was the impact it could have on both influencers and businesses alike. For influencers, brand deals are often won based on engagement and response to posts, if brands can no longer see the likes that an influencers posts are getting, what metrics are used instead? It seems that influencers will have to invest more time and effort into creating quality content if they want to attract brands to work with them rather than leaning on the number of likes they’re getting. It also means that businesses are now turning to analytics and engagement provided by the influencer to measure performance, which could lead to better partnerships and less pointless sponsorships.

For businesses, this could mean moving away from influencer marketing completely and leaning more on paid advertising on the platform. Instagram allows brands to run campaigns on Instagram main feed, but also on stories. Since likes have been hidden there has been a big move to stories by brands and influencers alike! It means businesses now have to start looking at specific content that drives revenue, which ultimately means better content for the Instagram users.

This move could also be a positive in allowing digital marketers to ‘switch off’ when scrolling through Instagram for their personal use. When we are presented with less information that we associate with marketing and advertising it is much easier to dissociate the platform with work!

We are of the opinion that Instagram are moving in the right direction from all angles, but would love to know your opinion? Does your business agree or disagree with the move? What effects has it had? Let us know.