If you were an MTV aficionado between 2006 and 2010, you likely remember Heidi Montag as Lauren Conrad's friend-turned-nemesis on the beloved reality show, The Hills, but you might have forgotten about her music career.
In her 2010 single “More Is More,” she sings: “More is more on the dance floor / It's f*cking chaos in here.”
Fourteen years later, this phrase aptly describes how many marketers feel about social media saturation.
Over 5 billion people worldwide now use social media, with the average person using more than six networks per month.
As platforms’ algorithms surface content based on interests, rather than specific connections, audiences seem to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The rapid pace of trends and meme culture, combined with the stream of AI-generated content that floods our feeds, has created a cap on the amount of content users can mentally and emotionally process.
We spoke with two social media experts to find out the forces behind this phenomenon and what marketers can do to combat it.
Why social media is becoming saturated
The social media landscape is changing dramatically, but the one thing that remains constant is content — and the amount of it: According to Sprout's 2024 Content Benchmark Report, brands will publish an average of 10 posts per day across networks in 2023. Depending on your industry, that number will double or even quadruple.
“We're heading towards peak flooding,” says Nathan Allebach, creative director at Allebach Communications and former “steak Twitter guy.” “It's hard to tell if saturation or a lack of novelty in content is to blame. A lot of the issues marketers are facing these days may have to do with the fact that social media has been around for a long time and has been through a number of different iterations. Disruptive marketing of all kinds is being explored so deeply across categories and industries that it's becoming harder to find a breakthrough.”
Let's take a closer look at what's causing the issue.
The pressure of content creation
It’s impossible for consumers to actively engage with all the social content they see — literally. One research team found that human attention span on a screen is declining from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds by 2023.
Ironically, as trends move faster and audiences flock to shorter content formats, the pressure to churn out more posts intensifies. This dynamic is exacerbated by the sheer number of accounts competing for users' fleeting attention.
“It's certainly convenient to think of brands as only competing with their competitors, but the reality is that your brand's content is competing with the latest viral post, influencer giveaways, other brands, and family and friends,” says Carolyn Cohen, Content & Social Lead at H&R Block.
Allebach added: “It's everyone versus everyone, so if you're a brand on the other side of the screen and you're trying to pull me away from my personal feed, it's going to take a lot of effort to get it right.”
How AI will impact audience expectations
Bots have been cluttering social media comment sections for years, but the recent proliferation of tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E and others has led to even more AI-generated posts being flooded across networks.
According to a Q2 2024 Sprout Pulse Survey, more than 80% of consumers believe their social feeds will become more saturated with AI-generated content, and the same number say they will see more misinformation on social. For example, a computer-enhanced video series promoting the new season of HBO's “House of the Dragon” series sent viewers into a frenzy in June 2024, leading many to believe that the Westeros flag was really flying on the Brooklyn Bridge.
On the one hand, users are becoming accustomed to AI filters and AI-generated content, which may desensitize audiences over time. From a brand safety perspective, marketers will have to not only monitor feeds for misinformation about their business, but also do their own content production.
Platform Uncertainty
Today's social media ecosystem is fragmented across networks, each with its own algorithms and audiences, and how consumers use each network to fulfill their needs for connection and consumption is constantly evolving.
“Back in the day, every brand had Facebook and Instagram. [account]”Probably Twitter, but I feel like those pillars are a lot less clear now. The community is now fragmented across a lot of different smaller platforms,” Allebach said.
The past few years alone have seen the emergence (and rapid decline) of platforms like BeReal and the steady growth of alternatives like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon. For many marketers, the question isn't how to be everywhere at once, but how to choose the right places to appear to your target audience. With each platform prioritizing slightly different content formats, it also raises the question of whether short-form video is still the best investment, or if your team should reallocate focus to more text and/or still image posts.
How to Overcome Social Media Saturation
The challenge of social media saturation is here to stay. Whether marketers are ready or not, AI technology will continue to advance and the platform landscape will continue to diversify. But what social teams can do is adopt new practices to increase their odds of cutting through the noise.
Invest in original content
Nearly four in 10 consumers say the most memorable brands on social media prioritize original content over jumping on trends, according to the Sprout Social Index™. Even the changes to the Instagram algorithm to crack down on aggregator accounts show the platform is moving toward original IP. Capitalizing on specific trends will always be an aspect of social media, but trends alone are not a long-term strategy for achieving reach and relevance for your brand.
“We've found that a mix of original content and trend-driven content tends to be the best combination. Trending content attracts viewers, keeps them engaged, they tag their friends, etc. This tells the algorithm to keep showing them your content, so if you have more product-centric content, they'll show that too,” Cohen says.
Tailor your content to your audience's tastes
The first step to capturing your audience's attention is to deeply understand what they want to consume.
For example, nearly every platform supports a menu of video options, forcing social teams to be more precise about where to post, how long the content is, whether it's grid-worthy, etc. According to our Q2 2024 Pulse Survey, in the past six months, Reels, Instagram Stories, and TikTok posts were the top three video formats that consumers engaged with the most. In the next six months, consumers expect to engage with Instagram Stories, Reels, and Facebook videos the most.
According to a Q2 2024 Pulse survey, “edutainment” posts that provide information about products or services in a fun way are the type of branded content that audiences find most entertaining. By comparison, only 4 in 10 consumers say this is true for meme-based posts.
“Trending memes explode in the zeitgeist and then fade away after a week or two at most. If you're a brand, you might be tempted to jump in the comments section or recreate it on your own account, and that's fine — you'll get the numbers, but what does that accomplish in the long run? As a user, you might find it funny in the moment, but you're not going to feel a deeper connection to the brand,” Allebach says.
Develop new rituals to spark creativity
The concept of social media saturation goes hand in hand with audience content fatigue. But it can also have a huge impact on marketer burnout. Pressure from external competitors and internal stakeholders to keep up with the speed of social media, generate more content, and do more with less is pushing teams to their limits.
At times like these, it's paramount to hold space for free-flowing ideas, creative thinking, and rituals for sharing inspiration. Our team at H&R Block takes this to heart.
“It's important to come out of your shell, especially in an industry like financial services, and one way to do this is to regularly conduct 'outside inspiration' exercises,” Cohen says.
“Each week, one person is assigned to present on literally anything they want, with the only rule being that they must draw parallels or direct inspiration from H&R Block. The topics we've covered are endless, including the rise of skincare, the history of denim, the influence of Ralph Lauren, bananas as the original content marketing case study, lessons learned from the 24th season of Survivor, and more.”
This exercise is a fresh way to go beyond your day-to-day roles and learn about a topic that not everyone on your team is familiar with.
Think about how you can easily build similar behaviors into your existing meetings and processes: maybe a dedicated Slack space for sharing asynchronous social examples (outside your industry), or regularly bring in “guest speakers” from other companies to share a behind-the-scenes look at their creative process.
Redefining how we measure success
As social platforms continue to test the limits of how much content audiences can process, now may be a good time to advocate for new social success metrics. Our Index data shows that most marketers already prioritize engagement metrics (shares, comments, etc.) over reach and impressions. After all, what's more valuable: someone who sees your post and scrolls through it, or someone who finds it relevant and tags a friend in the comments?
Social teams can take advantage of this saturation and insist on setting more targeted community growth and engagement goals rather than reaching a specific audience number.
“For brands to escape algorithmic decay (losing direct access to their followers and competing with other people and brands) they need to become more niche and think about what value they can add to the people who follow them,” Allebach says. “This helps them cut through the clutter and not necessarily have to fight against the macro trends that are dominating the discussion on the platform every day.”
Social media saturation is both a challenge and an opportunity
Today’s social platforms (even those that existed in 2010) are more nuanced, and the people who use them are more connected than ever before.
As a result, brands must become more strategic and flexible to ensure their social investments pay off.
Social media saturation presents obstacles, but it's also an opportunity for social teams to completely reset their content strategy. Run short-term experiments to test the impact of producing less and more original content. Prioritize new approaches to brainstorming or new team routines that free everyone up from their daily tasks.
Although social media works on algorithms, finding success is never formulaic.
For more inspiration on breaking through in an increasingly crowded industry, check out this Masterclass webinar with Rachel Karten.
