Social Media is Bullshit

In recent years, social media has been hailed as revolutionary and as a marketing tool that no entrepreneur or business can neglect if they want to be successful. But are these assumptions about social media really true?

Let’s start with the fact that most social media outlets are actually owned by corporations. Sure, it’s true that there was a time where we more or less had an equal voice on the web, and you could use your blog, for example, to independently gain access to an audience and be heard. But today the majority of the most popular blogs are owned by media conglomerates like Google, Time Warner or AOL.

In fact, most sites with user-created content are actually exploiting their users: people create content for free for sites like the Huffington Post, which the big corporations then turn to profit through advertising.

Furthermore, there’s nothing too new or revolutionary about social media. In fact, most of these “new” sites are simply reiterations of older ideas: before Twitter, there was AOL Instant Messenger; before Facebook, there was Classmates.com; and even Google has been around since 1999.

And they’re no more “revolutionary” than they are new. There is no real difference in the way we interacted with media before the advent of social media and what we do now: we tweet about what’s happening on TV, not the other way around.

Moreover, all the hype around social media sounds a lot like a pitch for a get-rich-quick scheme: just use social media and soon you’ll be a millionaire, too!

Social media is not a revolutionary marketing tool, but a handful of success stories where someone like Justin Bieber was lucky enough to get rich after becoming a YouTube sensation make it easier for Marketers to sell us the “secrets” of making money on social media, and for Analysts to sell their advice to businesses.