Rising Social Media Fatigue Challenges Businesses
Social media sites have inundated their users with so much information and activity that initially one is impulsively drawn towards it. Be it Bollywood viral videos, the Jamnagar pre-wedding pictures and reels, the food, fashion and styling vlogs, astronomy or astrology, social media has convincingly captured our time, space and energy. Facebook, X, Instagram, Threads and many more apps have conjured their magic around the many social media users all over the world. Social media has become an integral part of our lives, so much so that it’s causing, what is called as Social Media Fatigue.
During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and the year after that, due to lockdown and physical distancing, people had too much time at hand, internet and zoom calls were the only means to search and know about the virus, stay entertained and connected. This led to an extensive use of social media apps which was overwhelming and many users experienced exhaustion or feeling ‘worn out’ by it.
What is Social Media Fatigue & its impact on users/businesses?
Social Media Fatigue (SMF) is a term which states the tendency of social media users to withdraw from various sites because of its overuse which leads to tiredness and burnout. It is driven by information overload and too much time spent online. When Meta launched a social networking venture called Threads in 2023, approximately 100 million people signed up for it, of which half of them have left it by now! That’s again a result of information explosion and the users getting fatigued by it. Apps like Instagram have added too many features to it and it's overrun with advertisements in feeds. Users are opting for private messaging, DM’s or stories over curated and promotional content on their feeds. That is again too much content coming in users’ way, so people are finding ways to evade it.
Social media addiction is real. This mindless scrolling of various social media sites leads to mental, emotional and physical fatigue for people using it indiscriminately. Its symptoms include stress, comparison, loneliness, irritation and spending more time online. However, with a plethora of excessive information on the internet, one may develop fatigue and completely withdraw from its usage. Social Media Fatigue impacts our businesses too. If users start to link your brand with regular spam and low-quality content, their perception of your company will deteriorate. Also if your brand is devoid of entertainment, knowledge or eye-catching content, consumers will have little or no reason to interact on your page, thus reducing its visibility altogether. Users may then unfollow or block your page to declutter and that will be a setback to the business.
In businesses, Social Media Fatigue is connected with a decline in social media engagement, with users paying less attention to brand messages and becoming more choosy about their media exposure, resulting in poor brand performance. In fact, brand engagement levels appear to be declining: for instance, between 2020 and 2021, the two preferred platforms among brands - Instagram and Facebook - showed a fall in already low engagement rates. And on top of that majority of users are inactive and passive while browsing and do not interact with the brand’s content. The root cause of the decline in the user’s engagement with the brand stems from excessive posts.
(The author is the Founder of Digital Mill)
