In a recent office survey we asked which social media apps/platforms people use, and many responses mentioned WhatsApp. This sparked a discussion among the marketing team as to whether WhatsApp qualified as ‘social media’, which turned out to be a surprisingly contentious point.
In the digital space even more so than others, there are countless ways to define almost any term, but you can pretty safely define the difference between social media platforms and messaging apps as follows:
Social media platforms are built (and used) for broadcasting, messaging apps are built (and used) for communication.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social platforms are all designed to broadcast messages to a wide audience of friends, family, peers and colleagues. The likes of WhatsApp, WeChat, Skype and iMessage are messaging apps built and used to communicate most commonly between two individuals (and sometimes small groups). *
The two are very different, but more and more we see the lines being blurred. Why is it so important to distinguish between them? I think there are three key reasons:
Mental wellbeing
There’s no shortage of articles currently trending about how we need to switch off our phones and become more engaged with the world around us. I think you can achieve nearly the same effect by distinguishing your social media apps from your messaging apps, and either deleting or restricting use of the former. It’s a less drastic, more palatable way to improve your mobile health, and from personal experience testing this theory, I’ve found it reduces your phone usage while maintaining the truly valuable things (keeping up with close friends and family).
Marketing
There’s a subtle but disconcerting trend in social selling that has started to incorporate the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger into outbound lead generation. Sounds benign, until you realise that all that means is the act of contacting people on private messaging platforms to send a marketing message (e.g. recruitment). To those who’ve grown up with both social media and messaging apps, the distinction is clear and this overstep is egregious, but the more people confuse the two, the more prevalent this activity will become. Marketers need to learn that social media (broadcasting) is purpose-built for advertising, but messaging apps should stay off limits.
Meaning
Social media is designed to present a message about yourself, your group or your brand, for promotional purposes. Your holiday snaps, your new products, your social event — whatever you’re posting, whether personal or commercial, you’re posting to foster an image or promote a thing to a group of people. That can be valuable, but it’s very different from communicating one-to-one with an individual. When we send a message, we are communicating meaning — something genuine, tangible and personal to the recipient. When we neglect one for the other, most commonly by only communicating with our friends via social media, our relationships become based on that generic, exaggerated image we present. We lose a sense of the individual behind the profile.
Both social media and messaging are valuable, but for very different reasons. By distinguishing the difference between the two, we can better manage our time spent online, our smartphone usage and our priorities.
If you found this article valuable or informative, please do share it on social media (or via WhatsApp, your call).
*Of course there are overlaps — Facebook has Messenger, Snapchat started life as a messaging tool and later became more of a social platform. Nevertheless, Messenger is discrete from Facebook (it even has its own app) and 2018 Snapchat is clearly distinct from its earlier incarnation, though it combines both.
