One of the most influential people in the “digital solopreneur” ecosystem Justin Welsh publicly confirmed that social is dying, fast. And it’s no clickbait here.
I’ve been continuously reporting the ghost digital ecosystem over the past 18 months as it’s been crystal clear for executives and higher-ups.
Considering I get about 150 pitches weekly and 450 emails daily, investing the time to scroll through everything is often not justified and many abandon the networks altogether. If you are in a C-level role or the leadership team of 8, 9, 10-figure company, the chaos here is absolutely not justified.
👉 But what social was still “useful for” over these past 18 months was freelancers, small agencies, consultants, course creators selling to other indies and solopreneurs: full-time hires looking for a side business, freelancers seeking cheap clients, agencies boosting one another to help get elevated.
The fact that more and more “creators” who target that audience raise the same flag, create email newsletters and Substacks, move to closed communities, means that there isn’t much left in the spammy viral platforms nowadays.
For anyone objecting they still get reach or work now, great. I’ve been reporting this problem 18 months ago and some, including Justin, or Richard van der Blom‘s reports for dying reach, or course creators raising awareness this quarter, see the impact now.
Networks with a billion users don’t die overnight; but they slowly fade away as their active audiences move elsewhere, find another, better platform, or simply render the medium inefficient.
We’re seeing a similar trend with quality online content – tutorials, roundups, guides. For 2 years now, brands and executive teams have been shifting away whitepaper and report efforts away from Google organic SEO because chatbots are scraping these for free and NOT sending traffic to the original resources.
There’s no sense feeding the database… Which now leads to walled gardens and private communities in response to Google and AI bots.
📗 The digital ecosystem is changing fast. This has been unprecedented in a growing forums/socials/SEO cycle going up from around 2004 to 2022.
Social networks and organic search losing their appeal in just over a year after 18 years of accelerated growth is both oddly concerning and a major red flag completely led by executive decisions and broken algorithms.
P.S. Millions of people you still see in feeds schedule content or post and close the tab, only monitoring comments and DMs a few times a day. Don’t get fooled that “activity” in cross-posting content or getting VAs like comments results in them seeing your content or reciprocating back.
(I even have sales calls and clients indicating interest today, only to hop on a Zoom and meet an assistant from Asia managing their executive’s inbox and cluelessly setting 20 appointments with unrelated businesses.)
