Would your friendships, communities, or businesses still have strong ties without mass-market social media?

Gartner predicts that a perceived decay in value will drive 50% of consumers to abandon or severely restrict their social media usage by 2025. This predicted trend is largely driven by AI-generated content making the already dicey crap content scene on social unbearable for many. 

To be honest, I didn't consider AI six years ago when I started urging friends and the brands we work with to spend less on social media marketing and more on their own platforms and traditional networks. I saw the increasing cost and diminishing results, not the emergence of technology so sophisticated that it requires us to question whether nearly everything we consume online was created by a human or a machine. But here we are.
 
I disagree with Gartner that we'll stop using social media in mass. I believe we will stop using large-scale, ubiquitous, algorithmically driven addictive behavior sites like Instagram, TikTok, and maybe even YouTube in mass. The move is towards more niche sites we believe we can trust (whether we can or not is a different question). 

Television streaming is becoming more and more like old-school cable every day.
I think social media is about to go the same way. 

Being social digitally is going to be more and more like being social in real life--you'll have to find your communities and the places that work for you by invite, happenstance, and good old-fashioned relationship building. It will no longer be enough to show up on one or two big sites and throw some random content around.

Actually, that hasn't been enough in a long time. 

So what happens when there's nothing real on Instagram?

Perhaps the only alternative is to return to real life. 

Lourenia (Renia) Carsillo
Chief Strategist & Founder
Realign Consulting