The crisis is coming! Social media has all collapsed, and marketing is failing
| Over the past few years, I have been watching and participating in the evolution and development of marketing on various social media platforms. From forums to Weibo, and then to WeChat, we have experienced at least three generations of changes and iterations in social media. In recent times, my observations and reflections have given me the most sincere feeling that the power of social marketing is declining and is even in danger of becoming ineffective. When social media had completely fallen in 2005 and 2006, it was very easy to write a soft article in a forum to do product placement marketing. Because, at that time, the atmosphere in the forum was still relatively simple, and many companies were far from realizing the value of word-of-mouth marketing in the forum. After 2007 and 2008, more and more Internet trolls invaded the forums. Website administrators and moderators had a hard time fighting against them. However, driven by the strong demand of enterprises for social marketing, a large number of fake accounts appeared in the forums in batches, and some automatic posting software was developed. As a result, there were more and more spam advertisements in the forum, the forum ecology was destroyed, people began to flee, and the forum began to decline. Then, in August 2009, Sina became the first portal website in China to open microblogging services, thus opening an era of social marketing dominated by microblogging. Weibo has almost repeated the same path of decline as forums, with a large number of corporate and government Weibo accounts opened, and a large number of marketing accounts created in batches driven by profit. On Taobao, a large number of businesses have appeared that increase their Weibo followers and forward comments, and tens of thousands of zombie accounts have been created by marketing software companies. Just when many users are worried that they cannot gain 10 fans in a month, they can directly gain 10,000 zombie fans by spending 10 yuan on Taobao. With the strong promotion and support of Sina Weibo, more corporate accounts have flocked to Weibo and used it as the mainstream platform for social marketing. A large number of morning and night inspirational messages and corporate product news are continuously produced every day by dedicated Weibo operators and pushed to their fans on a regular basis. Weibo began to be completely occupied by accounts from businesses, media, governments, marketing, etc. The Weibo ecosystem was destroyed and people began to flee one after another. Today, WeChat, which is at its peak, seems to be going down the old path. Perhaps in the eyes of ordinary users, WeChat is just a social tool, but in the eyes of many enterprises and marketing companies, WeChat is now a social marketing platform. WeChat public accounts, Moments, WeChat avatars, signatures, and even album covers in Moments have all begun to be thoroughly developed into marketing resources. While many people are paying attention to the damage that the proliferation of micro-businesses has done to the ecology of WeChat Moments, in fact, the most serious damage to the ecology of this social media platform is that more and more companies are using WeChat as a marketing platform and are gradually shifting their focus from Weibo to WeChat. Moreover, unlike social media such as Weibo which are composed of loose and extensive friendships, WeChat is a platform with strong social relationships. Once a large number of companies use WeChat as an important social marketing platform, the ecology of WeChat Moments will be destroyed faster. Especially under the guidance of corporate marketing demands, there will often be a large number of friends sharing the same information in an instant, and the user's circle of friends will instantly be flooded with information. While many companies are still complacent about the effects of screen-sweeping, many users do not pay attention to the message that the companies really want to convey because of screen-sweeping. Instead, they quietly block the friends' circles of friends who have swiped the screen, or silently delete friends they are not familiar with. When a large number of friends began to try to unfriend each other and were harassed by more and more unfamiliar friends, WeChat has begun to follow the old path of forums and Weibo. Is social marketing failing? Today, forums have gradually lost interest, the decline of Weibo is a fact, and WeChat has begun to show signs of fatigue, but new platform-level social media platforms have not yet begun to emerge. The current era of social marketing seems to be experiencing a fault. There are several obvious features: 1. No one is so popular anymore. At the peak of the forum era, a large number of Internet celebrities were created. Some of them have disappeared, such as Sharp Brother, and some are still active in this era, such as Mu Zimei, Sister Furong, Sister Feng, etc.; and in the Weibo era, celebrities such as Genius Little Panda and Liu Jishou were created; and in the WeChat era, up to now, no Internet celebrity or opinion leader who is truly popular all over the Internet has been born, but more are commercial accounts operated by institutions, such as Luoji Siwei. Even since 2014, no phenomenal internet celebrities have appeared on all social media, including forums, Weibo and WeChat. Of course, there are also those who have become popular in a small circle, such as Rick, who became a small celebrity on Weibo some time ago. On WeChat, apart from many self-media digest accounts without personality or well-known self-media people in vertical circles, there are no real celebrities who are popular all over the Internet. 2. As an example of social marketing that has not made a brand famous , Xiaomi was frequently mentioned during the Weibo era. Xiaomi has also successfully involved every employee in the process of brand communication through its own Weibo matrix. In the process of Xiaomi brand building, Xiaomi Community and Weibo have been two very important positions. Xiaomi has also been shaped into a fashionable mobile phone brand for mobile phone enthusiasts and is sought after by a large number of passionate fans. There is also Durex, a condom brand that was originally difficult for Chinese people to talk about. Through interesting interactive operations on Weibo, it has attracted many loyal fans and built Durex into a fashionable brand. To this day, some companies still regard giving Durex to their users or customers as a creative idea or surprise. In the WeChat era, although many companies have attracted a large number of brand fans through the operation and promotion of WeChat public accounts, as far as I can see, I have not seen a brand that can benefit as much as Xiaomi or Durex in the era of Weibo. 3. There is no product that sells well. Perhaps when it comes to helping products sell, many people will deny it. Because, in 2014, micro-business developed rapidly with the help of WeChat, and many friends who were engaged in micro-business often showed off their sales revenue of hundreds of thousands or even millions. However, the truth behind many seemingly best-selling facial mask micro-businesses has been exposed one by one, with chat records and transfer records forged, exposing the essence of pyramid schemes, and a large number of facial mask products being held in the hands of lower-level agents and not actually reaching consumers. It is undeniable that on WeChat, a social marketing platform, most of the successful facial mask micro-business cases are just sales myths wrapped in the nature of pyramid schemes. However, some micro-businesses that sell other products such as agricultural products, local specialties, and handicrafts are faced with the dilemma that after consuming the effective WeChat friend resources, they are unable to further expand their social scope and open up a larger market. You might also say, didn’t Lianmeng and Zuji become popular on WeChat? However, their popularity life cycle is so short that by the time many people download the product and prepare to try it out, the popularity of the product has already passed. When marketing is everywhere, it has begun to fail. It is obvious that when more and more companies invest in the tide of social marketing, various means of social marketing have begun to gradually become ineffective. Hot spots are created one after another and then disappear quickly. As more and more hot spots appear and people become overwhelmed, they begin to become numb to marketing hot spots and find it increasingly difficult to be impressed or even scream with excitement. And if you have been following the development of social marketing, you will find that you haven’t heard or seen a truly successful marketing case for a long time. This is not an exaggeration. When marketing becomes the norm in life, when our world is surrounded by marketing events at all times and places, and packaged stories or reports are everywhere, you can no longer see the true appearance of this world, which means that it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to be moved by marketing stories. At the same time, some corporate employees engaged in operations, marketing, public relations and branding are still continuing the methodology that has existed since the forum era to promote their brands and products. Create, follow, and hype hot spots, hoping to leverage every social public event, extreme weather, or even human disaster to conduct marketing. So, we see that when smog comes, companies' public relations and copywriting become busy and start taking advantage of the situation to flood the screen; when a sandstorm comes, a The company's public relations and copywriting became busy again, and began to take advantage of the situation to flood the screen; after the plane crash, various news platforms and apps prepared copywriting and were busy taking advantage of the situation; the Spring Festival, Lantern Festival, Valentine's Day, May Day, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, Mother's Day, Children's Day and other large and small festivals at home and abroad, whether traditional festivals or imported festivals, are all marketing nodes, and they flood the screen! Swipe the screen! Swipe the screen! There is no creativity or novelty, no matter whether the brand matches the festival or not, everyone just follows the trend. Even ordinary users are familiar with these traditional tricks. Users who are used to being bombarded with marketing messages have long been aesthetically fatigued and just glance past them silently. Sometimes, shouldn’t we think carefully? Is it really a good tactic to blindly take advantage of the situation, frequently swiping the screen, and over-marketing on social media platforms? Simple and crude brainwashing communication methods like Melatonin may not be effective at all on Weibo or WeChat, and may even cause counterproductive effects. Because users now have more choices and more freedom than ever before. When he is tired of you "buzzing" like a mosquito in his world, he can unfollow you, block your messages or cancel your friend relationship at any time. The most terrifying thing is that he selectively ignores your marketing information, then you will never be able to truly enter his heart. |
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