Social media has long been the most straightforward, targeted, and efficient gate to enter customers’ and potential purchasers’ minds and get under their skin, serving as a venue for mutual exchange and benefit. Customers could be more easily read and understood by companies, which, through market research and the relevant insights gathered, could further come up with answers to their needs and preferences.
Evidently, social media served as a tool to guide those willing to jump on shopping trends to the right product or service—or the thing they thought they needed and have been searching for all their lives.
- photo credit: Luis Villasmil / Unsplash
Nowadays, a larger category of internet users is concerned that the material that pops up in their newsfeeds and the content they’re exposed to loses quality and relevance, potentially influencing many in unwanted directions.
A survey carried out by Gartner, a global tech research and consulting provider for the business sector, brought to light that 53% of consumers consider the social media platforms’ quality to be deteriorating gradually, mainly owing to the emergence of bots, rising misinformation, and unhealthy user bases. There’s growing concern about Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), with more than 70% of consumers blaming its prevalence for the gradually worsening user experience.
As we can see, the world may be at the dawn of a social media marketing revolution, where the once-reigning venture of gaining consumers’ trust could now be redundant. What could the future of marketing look like in the light of weakening social media power? What should we expect in the upcoming years?
More Consumers are Drifting Away from Social Media
The rising prevalence of AI-based marketing solutions is unbeatable, especially as, more often than not, the involvement of new and emerging technology may not even be detected. With over 500 plugins in the ChatGPT market only, among which brands abusively use some, it’s just a matter of time until almost every company or small enterprise adopts such measures. Canvas, for instance, will do the job of a highly paid photographer and editor, and more, raising the barriers in this sector.
The latest studies reveal a growing tendency of straying away from businesses that use GenAI for rather detrimental purposes, shifting their attention to those that know how to put the latest tech developments and bots to good use, beneficiating the modern consumer. Despite social media’s reigning position in the ranks of the most reliable investment channels for digital marketing, the customers of tomorrow seem to be convincedly seeking out a lower usage of these platforms.
Plus, a substantial share of consumers are adopting low-profile social media usage, sharing less and less about themselves and being more cautious about where their sensitive data, such as history bases, goes.
AI – a Rising Trend Among Marketers
Marketers are anything but strangers from AI, putting it to use for numerous purposes. According to a recent study, almost 9 in 10 marketers and communications specialists have explored AI at least once in their lifetime, with the leading apps being as follows:
- Brainstorming and legwork
- Speeding up content creation
- Better customer service
- Tailoring user content
- Carrying out research
- Text summarizing
- Text rephrasing.
After Diving Into AI, The Outcomes Could be Disappointing
Among communication experts and marketing specialists navigating the realm of AI, there’s a significant tendency to view emerging tech tools as either irrelevant or concerning. Less than 50% of them anticipate improved creativity and work quality through AI involvement, with the remaining specialists predicting worsening content quality.
The future of marketing is being shaped in today’s institutions and is being built around what members of Gen Z want and think. Predicting future trends becomes less of a guesswork when realizing that it’s the higher education institutions that have a significant impact on the marketing of tomorrow, for students today, the fertile ground for trailblazing ideas, have access to numerous education & higher ed market research services available aimed at assisting them and their tutors in exploring the fusion of marketing and social media.
Additionally, 40% believe that AI will contribute to a decline in the number of jobs available, while 22% foresee unhealthy impacts on team culture. It’s challenging to assert that marketers share a unanimous sentiment; instead, the feelings surrounding AI and its influence on future marketing are mixed.
Changing loyalty retention and customer acquisition tactics will be the focus of future-oriented businesses from now on.
Calls for More Creativity and Genuineness
The upcoming years will see more state-of-the-art creative occupations making use of GenAI for its ability to bring a plus of unicity in brainstorming sessions and beyond. As Deloitte studies show, a focus on inventive and out-of-the-box thinking will rise, calling for more genuine and outspoken marketing schemes.
The draw of cost savings and productivity through the emerging GenAI tools could mostly fit services based on creativity. Better productivity may enable senior creatives to give more thought to different strategic undertakings, like service information and AI products. Thus, savvy CMOs may boost spending in the creative content creation area, where GenAI could bring optimized solutions.
User-generated content will improve engagement and profit through growing brand authenticity. It’s projected that in two years, CMOs will have almost completely turned to tech tools driving unique results and brand-backed user-generated content, eventually shielding their companies from misleading info and content leaked by brands and entities misusing GenAI or employing it for all the wrong purposes.
Counterbalancing the GenAI-derived deceptive content
It’s predicted that CMOs will approach content authenticity tech in order to counteract the misleading, wrong, poorly-researched material released through GenAI. Such an achievement represents a goal on most CMOs’ agenda by the end of 2026 or, at least, the end of the decade.
Social media platforms are already overfilled by deepfakes, AI-generated synthetic media, cheapfakes, and even voice duplicating. TikTok, for instance, is on the path to making a tech bot available for all the platform’s users, giving them the opportunity to generate vocal content to spice up their accounts with just a small sample.
With the continuous change in social media activities and experiences, marketing executives and communication specialists will learn to adapt to the trends, targeting authenticity as a must-have. Otherwise, their businesses could be left in the dark.
Final statement
The social media exodus predicted by some of the most prominent business marketing analysts could be closer than anticipated. As such, savvy, future-oriented businesses must ride the new wave and focus on their authenticity, creativity, transparency, and real consumer familiarity.