Hey there,
There is this scene in The Last of Us where Ellie gets to walk through a post-apocalyptic mall. She walks around in awe, vines snaking around an old Victoria's Secret, glass covered-floors, and eerie fluorescent lighting.
Malls were places where you'd interact with every facet of humanity. Buzzing pre-teens giggling in Hot Topic, slow-moving retirees in Eddie Bauer, and tired parents staring into middle distance in a Toys "R" Us.
Then we built them online. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram— these places became our online malls. We could interact with our grandmother and our crush on the same platform that was advertising us some problematic Kardashian flat-tummy tea.
But, as we're all learning, it's actually really hard to build a space for everyone everywhere all at once.
There were around 30,000 malls in America in the 80s. Today, there are only 700 malls left in the US— and that number is expected to shrink to 150. I guess no one needed Hot Topic and Pottery Barn.
Facebook had its first user decline in 2021, and its growth has stagnated since. Meta continuously refuses to release demographic information, because they know what we know— Facebook is has been co-opted by the retirees and the racists.
And our other muddy town square isn't doing so hot, either. Twitter's advertising revenue is down 59%, and Twitter's top users are posting 25% less since the Elon takeover. Now, they're finding ways to make the experience even worse— playing with forcing you to log in to see tweets, and limiting the number of tweets a user can view.
And Threads, Meta's Twitter clone released yesterday, is a grasp for their users. It might work in the short term, but it ignores the larger trend that all marketers should be paying close attention to.
The spaces, online and off, where monoculture existed are disappearing.
We don't all watch the same shows, we don't all shop at the same central spot, we don't all consume the same news, and we don't all hang on the same online platforms.
We're leaving the large town squares in favor of micro-communities.
And the numbers back it up.
Discord has grown from 10 million users in 2017 to 192.6 million today. Slack's revenue has increased 36% from Q1 last year.
What does this mean for marketing?
It's going to be harder for us to reach audiences in central places, throwing ad dollars at Meta just isn't going to work. The most influential communities are going to be private ones, where marketers can't easily pay to play.
Instead of trying to get in front of 250k people who might be our customers, we'll pay to get in front of 10,000 people who we know are our customers. Sponsoring highly engaged newsletters and communities will become a necessary strategy to access smaller numbers of more targeted potential users.
When everyone hung out on the same 3 platforms, attribution was still a nightmare. In a micro-community future where third party cookies are obsolete, it's going to be near impossible to attribute traffic accurately. Maybe we're going to need a direct attribution strategy— just friggen asking people where they came from.
If you can't talk to your customers on Twitter or Meta anymore, how will you find them? Companies will need to build native communities, and get really good at integrating with existing ones. Marketers need to become expert community builders, a skill very different from the highly analytical marketing of the early 00s.
We're going to need to get more creative, and a lot more human in our marketing— and that, my friend, is kinda exciting.
And while we wait for the impending deaths of our collective town squares, let's hang on Threads while it's still good.
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