Navigating User Growth in a Post-Facebook World

As more information comes out about Facebook and its role in the spreading of disinformation and profile harvesting, many major long-term questions remain unanswered. But one in particular has the marketing world scared: is the distrust of social media here to stay?

Many digital-first companies in the last decade owe much of their success to tapping into and leveraging Facebook as their core marketing strategy. The use of Facebook’s powerful lookalike audience features, its unparalleled user demographics database, its algorithmic approach to multivariate testing and its offsite pixel-tracking capabilities have made it by far the dominant advertising platform.

But the unfolding events suggest there is a now a non-zero probability of a secular backlash against social media. As Recode’s Kurt Wagner says: “Facebook has dealt with these kinds of firestorms before. But this time feels different. Users are fed up. Politicians are fed up. And investors are clearly concerned: Facebook has just had its worst two-day stock performance since 2012, the year the company IPO’d. It has lost more than $50 billion off its market cap.”

As a growth systems thinker, I like to assess all possible scenarios, high and low, when assessing risk and strategy. Let’s play out the worst case: we see an onslaught of social media distrust by…