Engage at the Age of Private Messages
A media or a brand has to care about engagement. But how to engage when people tend to rather send more private messages to their restricted group of friends than publish content in social media ?
Remember at the beginning of Facebook : each personal account was created to talk about their experiences, share content send messages to other in publishing in their wall. Now influencers using pseudo talk in the public place but personal opinion of people is less and less present (seeing for example the phenomenon of just tagging a friend in a comment without talking).
BARRIERS OF PUBLISHING IN FULL PUBLIC VIEW
- Private data
Private life has become more and more important since Cambridge analytics matter. New social media featured as Instagram featured (talk with messages to someone and you know when he is connected) or Snapmap scare users.
2. Crowded feeds on social media
Many pages, many contents from plenty of sources are added every second to social media feeds.
3. Generational content
Let’s talk about Facebook. Millennial generation don’t use it anymore, because they don’t want their parents to see their Friday night photo. They want reduced groups of people that can have access to their publications. Because of it, they use Instagram.
4. Ephemerality
Snapchat and Instagram are much more used than Facebook for your generation. Young people don’t want their friends to have access to a picture forever. Sustainable data are not more appreciated, at least for sharing everyday life. That is why young generation use more and more stories.
5. Protect Personal Identity
Two profiles are using by more and more people that are scared about their self-presentation. They publish personal content with pseudo and public content with their real name.
Because of these trends, it is more and more complicated for media and brands to engage and exchange information with the audience. Today, for the reasons explained before and Facebook algorithms, reach on Facebook pages decrease and Facebook pages engagement do so.
WHAT IS THE SOLUTION ?
Whatsapp gather 1 500 million users, 1 300 million users for messenger and 1000 million users for WeChat (Statista, 2018). Only Facebook counts more users than these platforms. Instagram comes after with 813 million users. People open much more their messages than click on social media publications from a brand. They pay much more attention to messages than posts on social media.
What we call Social Media Messaging seems to become the solution of infobesity and lack of attention, engagement for brands and media.
Chatbots and social media messaging use from brands and media would consider the need of social media users to be considered as an individual that has its proper identity. That leads us to Bourdieu’s theory and brings « social capital » concept. Even if people need the public or semi-public sphere to talk, they also need personal conversation that makes them consider the media or the brand as on of their reference of their social capital. Be the audience « friend » in social media is the goal of new marketers and journalists. It is now compulsory to talk to him directly.
