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Advertisers face increased barriers to connecting with target audiences, as Google moves ahead with its plans to give consumers a choice over how third-party cookies are used in their Chrome browsers. Social media, however, remains a channel where advertisers can continue to achieve the targeting and personalization they’re used to—at least, in theory.
Evolutions in the social media landscape present significant new challenges to marketing teams looking to take advantage of personalization opportunities. The source of many of these challenges? Fragmentation.
While the internet users of 10 years ago were actively engaged with an average of four social networks, social media users today toggle between an average of 6.7 different social platforms each month. As such, marketing teams are tasked with evaluating how to effectively find and connect with target audiences across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, and more.
In this context, media teams are under more strain than ever before as they work to craft tailored strategies not only for each platform they choose to invest in, but also for the specific audiences they seek to engage across those platforms. The challenge grows even more complex considering the rise of niche platforms like Letterboxd and chat apps like Telegram, which have gained traction as users seek more personalized, private, and community-driven spaces. These newer platforms offer significant opportunities to connect with specific audiences, but the task of considering if, when, and how to test ad options on each one only increases complexity for marketing teams.
To maximize social media's potential for reaching targeted audiences with personalized messages, advertisers must afford their teams the time and resources they need to navigate this complex landscape efficiently. Adopting systems for gaining deeper audience insights and automating as many campaign processes as possible will be critical for success.
Many factors have contributed to the rise of social media fragmentation in recent years. One is simply the maturation of consumers’ interactions with these platforms: As social media usage has grown, so has the proliferation of content on social platforms, driving users to seek more personalized spaces and communities. Agency executives say they started to notice this shift around 2016 or 2017. The trend was then likely accelerated a few years later by the COVID-19 pandemic, as people in lockdown craved more social connection and sought it out within niche digital spaces.
These shifts in consumer behavior have contributed to the rise of more niche social networks like Nextdoor (a hub for locals in specific neighborhoods to connect online) and Discord (a platform for users to connect over channels, which are often centered around shared interests like gaming, hobbies, or fandoms). And this movement towards more private and hyper-specific communities has been embraced by major social platforms as well—think Meta’s focus on Facebook groups in the late twenty-teens, or X’s communities feature, which was rolled out in 2021.
Major social platforms’ curation of more community-minded experiences demonstrates another trend that’s contributing to fragmentation in the social space: Copycatting. Digiday dubbed 2022 the “year of copycats,” as many social companies introduced new features that resembled TikTok’s feed in order to keep up with the platform. This trend of copycatting has continued in the years since, as social media companies seek to adopt their competitors’ popular features in an effort to prevent users from leaving their platforms. The result is that while platforms like Facebook, X, and Snapchat used to be more distinct, the big players in the space are growing increasingly homogeneous. In this context, some advertisers are finding that focusing on specific communities within these broader platforms is the only way to cut through the noise. While specific communities offer new opportunities for advertisers to connect with targeted groups, it also increases complexity for marketing teams, as they must personalize their content to those communities—and then further personalize it to match the feel of the different social platforms they invest in.
Beyond the trend towards niche communities and the increasing homogeneity of major social platforms, other factors have led to the fragmentation of advertisers' social budgets. In the early 2020s, brands began rethinking their spend on Meta as costs rose and ad space grew saturated on the platform. Meta’s standing with advertisers has further fluctuated during bad press cycles , from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to reports that the platform’s algorithm amplifies misinformation and hate speech. Combine that with advertisers’ continuing exodus from X (the platform’s ad revenues dropped by 98% YOY from January through September 2023, and over one-fourth of advertisers plan to cut their spending on the platform in 2025,) the rise of TikTok, and moves made by other social platforms including Pinterest, Reddit, and Snapchat to improve their ad offerings in a bid to earn some of advertisers’ budgets, and it’s clear that fragmentation in the social space is driven by a variety of factors, none of which show any sign of letting up in the near future.
Fragmentation in the social landscape demonstrates a broader shift that advertising leaders must contend with to stay relevant in the coming years: the growing demand for hyper-personalized experiences, a shift driven largely by younger audiences.
Indeed, Gen Z is a major driver of fragmentation in the social space, as advertisers work to reach the generation across their favorite channels—namely, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat (although considerable portions of the demographic are also on Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, X, and Reddit). And the urgency around personalizing content to audiences on these platforms will only increase as time goes on. While Gen Z accounts for about one-fifth of the population, the generation that comes after it, Gen Alpha, is expected to surpass baby boomers in number by 2025. Given that 65% of Gen Alpha kids aged 8-10 are already spending up to four hours a day on social, there’s no doubt that when they come of age as consumers, they’ll be as digitally savvy and as expectant of personalization on the social platforms they use as Gen Z, if not more so.
To reach these social media users across multiple platforms requires considerable time and effort, given that each platform requires a different strategy and, oftentimes, calls for distinct creative: Instagrammers expect a more polished approach, for example, while messy short-form realness reigns supreme on TikTok, and YouTube is generally geared toward longer-form content.
Advertisers must also navigate the complexities of balancing media plans across the fragmented social media landscape. Incorporating disparate social media platforms into cohesive campaigns presents a major challenge to marketing teams. Advertisers need to be able to holistically (and accurately) measure performance across all these platforms in order to optimize spend, make mid-flight adjustments, and gain insights to enhance future campaigns. But many agencies and marketing teams aren’t yet equipped to do this without investing significant human resources. In this context, social media advertisers need more time and better tools with which to achieve holistic campaigns that meet social media users in the places where they spend time.
The challenges presented to marketing teams as a result of fragmentation in the social space and the urgency to meet consumers—especially younger consumers—with hyper-personalized messaging are clear. First, teams need more time and/or resources to manage campaigns across an increasing number of social platforms (and digital marketing channels in general); and second, teams need access to data that’s unified, organized, and compliant to inform that personalization.
Adding head count is one way to bolster marketing teams’ ability to personalize across channels, but marketing organizations will need to level up their tech stacks as well. Strategically investing in tools that serve to automate manual tasks will be a key component of this. As marketing organizations strategize around how to invest in AI, they should ensure that they’re evaluating solutions that free up time for their teams. For example, marketing leaders may want to make the most of AI’s ability to quickly analyze large data sets across platforms in real time to identify which channels and audience segments are delivering the best results, then allocating (or reallocating) spend to top performers—or, alternatively, adjusting creative to boost lagging channels.
Automation is another key area that advertisers may want to consider adopting to mitigate rising media fragmentation and complexity. Solutions that reduce manual labor by automating parts of the campaign process—from automated in-flight campaign optimizations to automated reporting dashboards—save marketing teams time that they can use for more strategic tasks.
Finally, advertisers must optimize their tech stacks as it relates to the collection, standardization, compliance, unification, and activation of data. Though social media fragmentation poses many challenges, it also presents brands with an exciting opportunity to use their spend more efficiently and effectively by targeting groups of consumers in hyper-personalized ways. But to do so, they must thoroughly understand their target audiences. By investing in tools like CDPs, which help to collect, standardize, organize, and activate on first-party data (increasingly important in context of signal loss), and platforms that can unify data from multiple social platforms in one place, advertisers can make these processes easier, more effective, and less time consuming for their teams.
As advertisers lose more and more signals and the digital media landscape continues to fragment, they will continue to see social media as an appealing destination for their media dollars. But despite those platforms’ targeting capabilities, marketing teams won’t have the time or resources they need to maximize their media budgets and deliver optimized, personalized journeys without levelling up their tech stacks. Those teams that invest in solutions that can automate as much of the campaign process as possible—with a specific focus on solutions that gather, organize, and unify both customer and reporting data—will set themselves up for success not only in connecting with target audiences, but making the most of each touchpoint.
As digital advertising grapples with fragmentation within social media and other channels, the stakes are clear: Marketing teams must find ways to streamline and unify their campaigns across platforms in order to meet a consumer base that expects highly personalized, omnichannel advertising approaches. To connect with the consumers of today and to set themselves up for success in connecting with the consumers of tomorrow, brand and agency leaders must level up their tech stacks in order to empower their teams and facilitate the agility required by the current media ecosystem. By harnessing these tools, brands can thrive in a fragmented social landscape and build stronger, more personalized connections with their audiences.