Thoughts

Over the last year or so, I’ve been asked to remove quite a few social media icons from websites.

Usually from the footer. Usually Facebook or Twitter.

It’s a tiny change. Delete a couple of links, adjust the spacing and move on. But it’s happened often enough that I’ve started to wonder whether it represents something bigger.

For most of the last 15 years, putting social icons on a website has been almost automatic. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. LinkedIn. Maybe YouTube. They sat alongside the privacy policy and contact details as if every organisation naturally had a useful presence on every major social network.

Nobody really questioned why they were there.

Now people are starting to take them off.

How did they get there in the first place?

Partly, I think, because of hype.

There was a period when social media was going to transform practically every relationship between organisations and their audiences. Brands needed communities. Businesses needed conversations. Everyone needed followers.

And for a while there was a very good reason to want them.

Social platforms offered extraordinary organic reach. Build an audience and you had a relatively direct way of talking to it. A Facebook page with 20,000 followers was potentially a valuable business asset.

So we put enormous effort into acquiring followers, and websites actively sent visitors away to social platforms to help build those audiences.

The little row of icons in the footer became part of the standard website furniture.

But the deal changed.

You built the audience. They own it.

Organic social has increasingly become a diminishing-return activity.

Platforms have every incentive to control distribution. They decide which followers see your posts, which formats receive reach and ultimately how much you need to pay to reach an audience you may have spent years building.

That doesn’t make social media useless. Far from it.

It makes its usefulness much more dependent on what you’re actually selling and who you’re trying to reach.

If you sell T-shirts, Facebook and Instagram might be brilliant. The product is visual, relatively inexpensive and can be bought impulsively. Social advertising and content have a natural role in discovery.

Financial services are different.

Someone probably isn’t scrolling through Facebook, spotting an amusing Reel from a pension provider and thinking: you know what, I really should consolidate my retirement savings.

That’s an exaggerated example, but the point is that we spent years treating social media as a channel every organisation should participate in rather than one that should have to justify itself like any other.

Social became the strategy

I’ve seen plenty of organisations where “digital” gradually became synonymous with “social”.

It’s understandable. Social media produces visible activity.

You can publish something every day. There are numbers everywhere. Followers, impressions, likes, shares, comments and engagement rates all create the reassuring sense that something is happening.

But activity isn’t necessarily value.

A website quietly answering the right question for 500 potential customers might be considerably more valuable than a post receiving 50,000 impressions.

An email list of 5,000 people who have actively asked to hear from you may be more useful than 50,000 followers an algorithm allows you to occasionally reach.

Search, CRM, email, useful content and genuinely good digital products aren’t always as visible internally as a busy social feed.

But they can create much more durable value.

Content isn’t cheap either

There’s another part of the equation that gets overlooked: making good social content is expensive.

Not necessarily in media spend, but in time.

The standard for what constitutes a decent social post has risen enormously. A photograph and a couple of sentences have been replaced by video, motion graphics, subtitles, photography, editing, copywriting and an apparently endless supply of vertical content.

Even a relatively simple polished video can involve planning, scripting, filming, editing, graphics, approval and then adapting it for several different platforms.

Someone has to do all of that.

For larger organisations that might mean an internal social team, designers, photographers and videographers. For smaller businesses it often means somebody trying to squeeze content production in alongside the job they’re actually supposed to be doing.

And social has an unusually short shelf life.

You can spend hours producing something that gets a burst of attention for a day or two before effectively disappearing.

Then the machine needs feeding again.

Compare that with putting the same effort into a genuinely useful piece of content on your own website. It can appear in search, answer customer questions, generate enquiries and continue providing value months or years after it was published.

That doesn’t mean polished social content isn’t worth producing. For the right business it absolutely is.

But its cost needs to be part of the calculation.

If maintaining a good social presence takes several days of someone’s time every month, the question shouldn’t simply be are we getting engagement?

It should be:

Is this the best thing we could be doing with those days?

Then there’s the other problem

Social platforms have also become increasingly unpleasant places to send people.

I’ve written before about the toxicity of social media, so I won’t repeat all of that here. But it changes the calculation.

Twitter is probably the clearest example.

For years, adding a Twitter icon to a website felt completely neutral. It simply meant: we’re also over here.

That isn’t necessarily what it means anymore.

Platforms develop identities of their own. Their moderation decisions, politics, advertising, algorithms, owners and communities become part of the environment you’re asking somebody to enter.

A brand linking to a social network isn’t endorsing everything that happens there, obviously.

But there is still a reasonable question to ask:

Why are we sending people there?

The footer icon is stranger than it looks

This is the bit I find most interesting.

Someone has arrived at your website.

You control the experience. You control the design. You control the content. You can measure what works. You can help them understand what you do, contact you, buy something, sign up or continue exploring.

And somewhere at the bottom of the page we say:

Leave our website and go to Facebook.

Once they’re there, you’re competing with their friends, family, news, memes, outrage, videos, adverts and an algorithm specifically designed to keep them on Facebook.

When social audiences were hugely valuable, there was an obvious argument for making that trade.

Today I’m not sure it’s always there.

This isn’t the death of social media

Billions of people haven’t suddenly stopped using social media.

And for some businesses, some audiences and some kinds of content, social remains one of the most effective channels available.

TikTok can create extraordinary discovery. Instagram is incredibly powerful for visual businesses. LinkedIn can be valuable in B2B. Facebook can still sell an enormous number of products.

The mistake is treating any of those statements as universally true.

Maybe what we’re seeing isn’t the decline of social media itself.

It’s the decline of social media by default.

The assumption that you need to be everywhere.

The assumption that follower count is inherently valuable.

The assumption that publishing more frequently means your digital strategy is working.

And perhaps even the assumption that every website needs that familiar little collection of logos in its footer.

Remove the icons

I’m increasingly interested in digital channels having to earn their place.

If Facebook generates sales, use Facebook.

If LinkedIn generates leads, invest in LinkedIn.

If TikTok puts your work in front of an audience you couldn’t reach elsewhere, make TikToks.

But if you’re publishing because the content calendar says Tuesday needs a post, getting negligible organic reach and then using your own website to funnel people towards a platform that provides little measurable value in return, perhaps it’s worth asking why.

That doesn’t necessarily mean deleting the account.

It might just mean removing the icon.

And that tiny change in the footer might tell us quite a lot about where the last decade of social media hype has finally ended up.