Once upon a time, Twitter was for text, Instagram for images, and Facebook for checking out your friend’s holiday photos.  Remember that?

Whatever we once imagined social media could become, it stopped being that a long time ago.  Its once lean and agile form is now buried beneath a bloated, unrecognisable facade.  Gone are the days when it could “move fast and break things”.

The modern day iterations of these platforms stagger from congressional hearing to antitrust lawsuit, weighed down by layers of excess and scrambling for relevance.  A pale shadow of the establishment disruptors they once claimed to be.

Social media has reached an inflection point.  It is facing an identity crisis, struggling to define its purpose, unable to reconcile its chaotic present with the ideals of its past.  This is Luke Skywalker wrestling with his conscience and deciding maybe I’ll give this dark side thing a go.

Facebook in particular is in existential drift, pigeon-holed as old and uncool, grappling with a role it never asked for.  And spending time with questionable friends.

Instagram is obsessed with its appearance, desperately trying to stay relevant in order to attract younger admirers like its trendier neighbour TikTok.

Meanwhile Twitter (sorry, you asked us to call you X, didn’t you), never stable at the best of times, is experimenting with cool new toys like payments and cryptocurrency.

(At least LinkedIn has remained true to its base, as flooded as ever with humblebrags, fortune cookie wisdom and the phrase “I’m thrilled to announce…”.)

Mark Zuckerberg seems to have recognised the predicament.  His ditch-the-fact-checkers speech on 7th January 2024 was peppered with references to “getting back to our roots” (three times, to be exact).  Which he presumably intended as a return to foundational principles rather than a nostalgic lament for lost youth.  Make Facebook Great Again?

It seems Meta wants to take a career break from being the self-appointed “arbiters of truth”. Fine. But no mention of ditching the other mission creep baggage, like being a dating site, streaming platform, or e-commerce marketplace.  They are all apparently still core to its purpose.

Meanwhile, X’s plan to rediscover its mojo involves a seamless transition from being the “world’s town square” to being the world’s bank.  It sees no conflict between its reputation as a breeding ground for chaos and misinformation and its ambition to become the trusted payment provider for online trade.  Hmmm.

Somewhere along the journey, social media decided it should be all things to all people.  Or the “everything app”, as Elon Musk has called it.  Including the place where businesses connect with and sell to their customers.  A chair being used as a step ladder, if ever there was one.

However platforms built for likes and memes don’t easily transform into reliable business marketplaces, any more than e-commerce sites morph into social networks.  Anyone remember Amazon Spark?

The social media proposition for business has never looked so grim:

• Droves of users leaving X and Meta platforms.
• A large portion of the remaining users are bots.
• Single digit engagement from organic posting.
• €2.8 billion of EU GDPR fines since 2018 against social media companies for failing to protect user data

Not to mention fraud.  Last year it was estimated that more than a third of Facebook Marketplace ads were scams.  In the UK alone, TSB calculated that buyers lost over £160,000 per day to fraud on the platform.

So, let’s recap.  In order to reach their customers via social media, businesses must navigate an untrustworthy, ineffective echo chamber of conspiracy theorists, bots and fraudsters, all for access to an ever-diminishing audience of questionable authenticity.  Which part of this screams “good for business”?

And yet retailers are trapped in an unhealthy co-dependency with their platforms, like hostages unable to break free from their captivity.  Over time they become dependent on the diminishing rations their captors dish out, convinced that whatever scraps they get are better than nothing at all.  It is social media Stockholm syndrome.

Businesses and their communities deserve better.  They shouldn’t be fighting for elbow room alongside clickbait and cat memes.  They need technology that is fit for purpose, and connects them with their customers without treating both sides as pieces of data.

This isn’t just wishful thinking.  (Warning – product plug incoming!) Across the UK, Ireland, and the USA, place managers and business organisations are already embracing better, more focused alternatives — platforms designed with real community and business needs in mind.

Social media isn’t going away.  But it needs to do some soul searching.

Like any moment of reckoning, the answer surely lies in a return to basics.  To a time when social media was about real relationships, not algorithms designed to exploit them.  When it genuinely thought of its users as a community instead of a commodity.

“Back to our roots” sounds like the right direction, maybe just a lot further back than Mark Zuckerburg had in mind.