The 2024 Social Media Outlook: Q&A With Andrew Gillman

An active supporter of the Iowa Association of Business and Industry, Performance Marketing works with clients across Iowa. The Corridor Business Journal, which serves the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City and Quad Cities business communities, recently asked Performance Marketing Director of Delivery, Andrew Gillman, for his view on the state of social media and the challenges involved in helping businesses succeed on social platforms. Their conversation follows.

Generally speaking, what does the world of social media look like right now?

Social media is in a state of upheaval. Platforms are changing constantly, which means businesses have to pivot often — and quickly. These changes also mean we’re on the edge of some very exciting things related to technology and social media marketing.

Are you seeing any challenges?

Absolutely. Data privacy is a big challenge. The increase in regulations in recent years has made targeting across social channels more difficult. For instance, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, eliminated several valuable audience profile qualifiers from their paid media platform (Ads Manager). This makes it difficult to target users based on home ownership status, household income and home value, just to name a few.

User protection and privacy have an impact on all areas of social media to varying degrees, but especially on paid social. Because paid social media is a mechanism for getting in front of broader audiences, it’s hit with data privacy regulations harder than the organic and user-generated content side of social platforms.

So, what’s the impact of data privacy on brands?
Since data privacy challenges apply mainly to third-party data, brands should prioritize capturing first-party data. The difference is that first-party data is volunteered by existing and prospective customers, meaning it’s less problematic to use. Brands may also need to pivot to broader targeting options, and then continue to optimize those campaigns to zero in on the most responsive and worthwhile audience segments.

What about consumers?

Consumers can control the marketing messages they see easier than ever before. Each of the main social media platforms has some degree of privacy settings that allow users to control their exposure to brand messages.

Marketers keep trying to fit social media into the traditional PESO — paid, earned, shared, owned — model. But because of the dynamic nature of social media, it’s too large and complex to fit into a singular box. Social media fluctuates between three distinct areas:

1. Shared, when focusing on amplifying social content.
2. Owned, when focusing on organic content development.
3. Paid, when focusing on reaching new audiences.

There’s not a one-size-fits-all formula but using all three tactics will yield the best results. For some businesses, they focus more on sharing original content and connecting directly with their current followers, while others’ priority is to reach the masses and grow their audience using paid campaigns. Make sure to test all three strategies before ruling any out — you might be surprised at which one performs the best.

Can you touch on how companies might use each of the major social platforms?

Meta has billions of global users, which makes it a great choice for targeted advertising. Other benefits are its seamless cross-platform branding and advancements in virtual reality and augmented reality experiences. The downside is only large companies with deep pockets are currently able to fully leverage these opportunities. Until Meta’s marketing solutions become more scalable, it’s OK to focus on your current platforms and see how they evolve over the next year.

As far as Threads and X, which is formerly known as Twitter, they’re in an ongoing battle for audiences and only time will tell if X or Threads will prevail. Any social media community manager worth their salt will be monitoring Threads closely to see where it goes. But until it’s a viable platform for your brand, it’s fine to observe from the sidelines.

TikTok is super trendy, making it tricky. It pushes its creators to fit within the platform’s preferred content style — favoring short, low-production, vlog-style content. This style can be counter-intuitive to the polished style many brands prefer. As a result, the platform favors personalities over brands. But some savvy brands are adapting and learning how to create TikTok-worthy content. TikTok has a style all its own and it may or may not be yours.

About Andrew

Andrew is the Director of Delivery at Performance Marketing, part of the Des Moines-based Anthologic marketing and technology collective. With over 15 years of experience crafting stories both on the brand side and agency side, he brings a unique perspective to helping clients get their messages out into the world. Andrew joined Performance Marketing in 2011 and lives in West Des Moines with his wife Lizzie, two daughters, a toothless terrier and a hamster. Andrew holds a B.A. in Spanish from Iowa State University.

‍This article was republished with the permission of ABI.

This article was published before January 2024 and does not reflect the consolidation of Performance Marketing, Vector Haus, and Blue Traffic into Anthologic.