Today in Digital Marketing - Predictions: How the Social Media Platforms Will Perform in 2025

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

Tod speaks with Andrew Hutchinson about his predictions of what 2025 will look like for the major social media platforms, digital marketers, and the emerging platforms in the space..📰 Get our free daily newsletter🌍 Follow us on social media or contact us📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers.GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Premium tools: Update Credit Card • Cancel.MORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital🌟 Rate and Review Us🤝 Our Slack.UPGRADE YOUR SKILLSGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesInside Google Ads: Advanced with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and Courses.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Associate producer: Steph Gunn.Some links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Well, what a year it has been. AI has shaken up the search market. Google might have to break up. Privacy legislation keeps kneecapping ad campaigns. But amidst all that change, two things are clear. First, it's only going to get more chaotic next year. And Andrew Hutchinson... And second, Andrew Hutchinson from socialmediatoday.com will be there to document it all.

Andrew puts out a superhuman amount of content each day there. And every year we steal him away to talk about what he thinks the next 12 months will hold for us on the social media platforms. Andrew joins me from his office in Canberra, Australia. Hello, Andrew. Hello, Todd. How are you? Lovely to see you from lovely sunny Canberra. So before we look ahead, I want to get your take on what you think was the biggest news event in social media this year. What do you think? I mean, if historians are writing that, what do you think

it would be? The biggest focus is obviously AI and putting more and more AI in there. But I personally don't think AI is that beneficial for social media platforms. I mean, social media platforms are inherently social, which is generally human to human contact. So I would think you want more of that. And over the years, we've complained about bots and bot replies and bots sort of infiltrating. And now they're like, yeah, but now bots are cool. You can talk to them and they'll talk back. And it's like, yeah, but they're still bots. But for some reason, I mean, the platforms obviously have their own reasons for investing into AI and building these massive systems and they're spending so much money on them that they want to get used out of them.

But yeah, I'm not sure they have a practical use case in social media apps. Like, do you really want to be, you know, Facebook puts those prompts saying, create a picture of an alien. It's like, why? Why would I want to do that? And then why would I want to post that? Like, it's not me. It's not a personal experience. It's not something that I can share from my perspective, which was what the whole point of social media was.

So yeah, I'm not exactly sure if those had the value. But in terms of shifts, in terms of actual platform shifts, as opposed to what they would like you to focus on, the shifts to threads and blue skies, obviously the biggest,

broader shift in terms of usage. Yeah. And just even in the last couple of weeks, last month or so, BlueSky has seen a remarkable uplift. All right. Let's get to those platforms in a second. But let's talk about the big one, Facebook. And when you're talking about AI, it sort of struck me that this messaging bot thing just keeps coming around. It only feels like what, maybe five years ago, four years ago, when Mark Zuckerberg stood up in front of everyone and said, it's everything is going to be message bots. And then all the platforms like Sprout Social and Hootsuite built message bot stuff into their platforms. They're still there. And then he's like, yeah, it's the metaverse now, and then it always seems to change.

So Facebook, are we going to see that level of chaos, do you think, next year, or will Facebook start to settle down? What do you see ahead for the big blue platform, as they call it internally? Yeah, they're going to pump out more AI stuff. And as I said, you've got those prompts in stream where it's like, create a picture of this. The weirdest one was during the Olympics,

and it's like, imagine an equestrian event it's like i could literally watch an equestrian event right now why do i need to imagine an equestrian event why would i need you to generate this i can literally watch the real thing um so yeah i'm not sure that like mark zuckerberg said last week that uh facebook ai is now close to or sort of meta ai is now the most used ai chatbot in the world with 600 million users. But I think they're sort of fudging the figures a little bit in terms of the scale of Facebook is what, 3 billion. So you've pumped it into every single app. You've now got AI chatbots in Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook.

It's like, of course, some people are going to use it and check it out. And how they qualify usage, like is it time spent is it value they're getting out of it um like a raw number is not really indicative of how valuable those systems are so um but they're going to keep pushing it out there because they're investing so much money into it like meta in particular is under pressure because they're spending so much money on their next level bets and it was the metaverse as you say they were spending billions on building their vr systems and they realize people that's too far out. They've gone too early and people don't care about the metaverse as yet. So then they've shifted to AI, which is the big thing of the moment.

And they had been developing AI for a long time. They've got lots of higher experts working on their AI systems for years, for over a decade. And so in some ways, once OpenAI come out, it was sort of annoying to them because they're like, we've been doing this stuff for a long, long time and you guys are just jumping in and stealing all the thunder in that respect. So they're definitely going to put out more and more AI stuff. But in my view, the true value of Meta's AI systems will be later on once the metaverse and VR does become a thing because it will simplify creation in AR and VR worlds. If you can speak something into existence, as opposed to having to have 17 degrees in information

technology to be able to understand all the requirements of virtual reality programming, if you can just walk into a virtual room and say, I would like to be at a waterfall and it just creates a waterfall, that would be pretty amazing. So I can see where it goes to from here, but in a practical sense right now, I don't see it being hugely valuable, but I do see that Meta is going to keep chucking stuff out there because they're investing so much money into it. And, you know, I mean, their ad platform has had AI built into it for years now. Performance Max on the Google side is AI. Advantage Plus on Meta's side has been AI. It's just we've only started calling it AI. I think before that we called it machine learning or, you know, it was the buzzword du jour.

And so far, you know, I think Meta has been on the ad side of things a little bit slow, which is probably good in terms of building it into the ad platform. You know, we've seen it. Yes, you can create product images, but I think they're spending more of their voice on using AI to take your product and put it on different backgrounds instead of just wholly invent stuff. Do you agree? Do you think that that's where they've gone? And where do you see Facebook in terms of the ad side of things in the next year? Yeah, I mean, they said last week, I think that a million advertisers have used their AI tools

within their ad systems already. And that is primarily what it's for. Definitely for backgrounds and things like that, there seems like there's a real value to being able to come up with a whole lot of creative variations very quickly.

So I think in that regard, it's definitely useful. And the advantage plus targeting is definitely helping a lot of advertisers as well. They keep saying that it's improving targeting because it's much better able to understand what people are going to respond to. Because it's using all the Facebook data, it can know that these people are more likely to click on ads and these people are more likely to be interested in these things. And obviously, that is a valuable use of the system as well.

So again, it's like you're looking at the different uses use cases of ai i guess the the front end use cases where it's generating images and searches and stuff is like yeah you know i don't know if that's hugely valuable but um yeah advantage plus is going to be the only way that you can target on facebook i think they're going to cut down more and more of your options um because they want to improve performance and the the more they automate that, the more they put in their system knowledge, the better performance they're seeing. So I think they're going to take out a lot of your options, which you think they're going to improve targeting, but they're generally not. So because it's generating better results, I'd say over time, you're going to have fewer and

fewer options and you're going to basically automate most of the process. You're just going to be able to put in your creative or even put in a website. It'll take the creative from the website. It'll come up with variations. It'll pump them out to people and you won't have much input in the whole process. Which is good for some people. Some people really like that. Old guys like me hate it.

Speaking of things that old guys like me hate, let's talk about Instagram. Where do you see that in the next year? Is that still going to be a going concern in spite of all of the competition? I mean, Instagram still feels like it's lost in between a little bit in that it was an image sharing platform. It was the photography platform. It had a sort of defined identity. And then when it was like, oh, stories has come out and they tried to buy Snapchat and Snapchat said no. So they said, okay, we'll kill you. And they bought out, they took stories and put it into Instagram suddenly it changed what instagram was and then from there it's become it was all video for a long time there was the big focus on video and long form video and all that sort of stuff

which all didn't work yeah igtv which is gone now igtv yeah all that sort of stuff which just didn't go anywhere and then um they tried shopping as well shopping sort of like yeah that didn't really work either so then they moved on to reels once t sort of caught on, then it was like, now we've got Reels. But in that whole shuffle, now you've lost the differentiation of what Instagram is. So I feel like Instagram for most people, because there's so much Reels now, 50% of the content that you see in your feed is recommended by its AI systems, not from the people you follow anymore. Wow. Because they know that that's obviously driving a lot more engagement.

So it feels to me like it's sort of a worse version of TikTok for the most part. They're giving you reels, which just like their targeting is not as good to me personally and anecdotally from other people and from surveys and stuff. That's what it feels like at the moment is like, is it really that valuable? It sort of feels like an older person's app to a degree in terms of sharing messages and whatever else whereas the younger people are using snapchat and tiktok so it's sort of in between i don't feel like it's got a real identity as such i don't feel like it's got like i feel of all the social of the big social apps it's probably got the least sort of like that's its specific lane i don't know that they can improve that, but they're getting so much engagement out of Reels

that I don't think they can. Yeah, it does seem like sort of the copycat app. You mentioned Snapchat. You know, every year when we do this, I always sort of remark on how it feels to me. I don't know whether this is accurate or not, but it feels to me that Snapchat is kind of just sort of doing its own thing

sort of on the outskirts of the social media landscape and doing a pretty good job at it. They've been a little bit shaky in the last few months. Can we talk about what you think the next year holds for Snapchat? I think Snapchat's in a difficult spot because their AR development is going to get blown out of the water, basically. So they've got their AR spectacles and that's their big project. Snapchat's had to cut costs a lot because they just haven't been making as much money. Snapchat's biggest problem is that its appeal is to a younger audience. As that audience gets older and they spend more money, Snapchat's not holding them as long. They have been working on that and they did release some stats recently showing that older users

are sticking around for longer. But that's been a real challenge for them. But also they're entirely reliant on the US and European markets and they're not, as much as they're getting users in other markets like India and developing regions like Indonesia, they're not getting money from those regions yet their advertising systems aren't, or their advertising is not being adopted in those regions as much. So it makes it difficult for them to grow. And as I said, they've scaled back a lot of their stuff,

a lot of their extra bets and projects. They had that drone for a little while, which they just dumped straight away. And a couple of other things like that they've tried out. It's just like, it's just not, they don't have an extra place to go. AR has always been where they're strongest and they've stayed focused on their AR spectacles project

and enabling people to experience AR on the go. But the meta glasses look a lot better. So I'm not sure how they're going to be able to compete with Apple and meta in that market. And especially when you consider that meta Ray-Ban glasses are selling so well at the moment. It's like they've already got an established sort of pipeline for where that's going to lead to and how they're going to sell those glasses. And they've got the deal with

the creator of Ray-Bans to be able to come up with more stylistic versions. Like all of it seems to point to Meta's glasses being not only better, but probably cheaper in the end as well. And if that's the case, I don't see where Snapchat can sort of fit into that. I don't see how they're going to be able to compete. I think their best bet is to focus on AR development and trying to link into other platforms like maybe creating AR experiences for Meta or for Apple, and that would be a better way for them to go. But on their own, I just don't see how they're going to be able to stay up with these other platforms coming through. So as much as they're still pretty catchy with younger users and they're able to, like Snapchat's up to 850 million monthly active users. So it's not like

it's losing ground in that respect. It just seems like in terms of making money, it's going to be more and more challenging as those other players come in. All right. So that's Snapchat. Let's talk about its arch nemesis or one of its many arch nemesis, I guess, TikTok, which despite being potentially banned in a few weeks from the US, I think had a pretty solid year, no? I mean, yeah, TikTok's obviously continued to grow. But yes, the US ban looms large over its operations when there's 170 million of its users potentially about to be cut off after it lost its court case recently. Yeah, it's looking increasingly likely that TikTok is going to be cut off. I mean, the biggest focus for TikTok is shopping. They want people to buy stuff in stream because that's

where they've seen the most success with the Chinese version of the app, which is called Douyin. In China, people are much more, or Chinese people seem much more adaptable to shopping online. They seem to be very keen to have apps where they can do lots and lots of things in one app as opposed to having to go all over the place. And yeah, shopping is one of the main things. Livestream shopping in particular has been huge in the Chinese market and TikTok has been trying to push it in Western markets,

but it just hasn't caught on. But it is catching on slowly, just not at the same rate. I think TikTok boosted its income by like 30% last year. It made 3.8 billion overall. So it is making money. It's just not seeing the gains that it did in China, where it's now making, like Douyin is generating something like $500 billion from sales in the app. So that's where their big moneymaker is and that's where they're really focused on pushing to get more people to buy stuff. So as much as they are developing AI tools of their own and things like that, it hasn't really been a big focus for TikTok.

I think what they really benefit from is that their algorithm is really, really good. It adjusts your interest so quickly, like within five videos, it's changed what it thinks you're interested in. And theoretically, that should mean that they can do well in shops as well, because then they can show you products that you're interested in. So that's going to be their biggest push is trying to get more people buying more stuff in stream. The signs suggest that that's probably going to happen, but I'm not sure about their tools where they've got AI-generated influencers on live streams that are able to sell things for you 24-7. I'm not sure that that's going to be as engaging, again,

as it has been in China, that has worked in China, but I still feel like that's not really the experience that people want from social media apps, but that is another aspect they're looking at. But yeah, shopping is the big thing for TikTok. And influencer marketing as well seems to have a special little corner of TikTok as well, where you see that paid placement logo. It's not technically an ad, it's a collaboration, but all those collab tools are kind of built into TikTok now and providing a lot of strength. All right. Before we talk about kind of the new players and so on, I want to get your sense of B2B. And LinkedIn, of course, is the big player there.

LinkedIn, I think, just kind of chugging along. Every time you cover LinkedIn's financials, I always get a laugh because you mentioned that LinkedIn every year or every news release talks about how the last quarter had record engagement, but they never actually tell you what those numbers are. But it's been in the last four years of quarterly reports. Have they ever not said they've had record engagement in the past quarter? Once. Yep. Once. Once. Okay. All right. And we still don't know what the actual numbers are. You know, they claim enormous numbers,

but they're sort of, I don't want to say fudging it, but, you know, there's some fast and loose with the numbers. In the next year, where do you think LinkedIn is going to be? Any big changes to what we see, or is it just kind of going to chug along the way we've seen it? Well, I mean, LinkedIn's dictated, obviously, by Microsoft, and Microsoft is so big on AI with their investment in open AI that they just like, just put AI into everything. To me, again, I really think that's problematic on LinkedIn

because that's where you want to have people showing their skills and their expertise and their knowledge. And if you're just generating posts via AI, or if you're making it so easy for them to generate posts via AI, how do you get a sense of that? How are you getting an understanding of what that person's competencies are? So with all their generative AI stuff, I don't know that it's as beneficial. I actually think, as I wrote in my post, that I think LinkedIn might even look at scaling back some of that AI stuff, because it just seems like it's too intrusive, or it seems like they're making it too easy to cheat in a professional sense by posting. Like right now, I could go to LinkedIn, look up what are the big topics in social media of the day, generate a response, post that, and then post that seven

times a day. And suddenly I look like an expert and none of that's my own thoughts, right? So it's like- Yeah. And all the comments underneath have been AI generated as well because it prompts you. It's like, you get your choices's like, I don't know. And all the comments underneath have been AI generated as well because it prompts you. It's like, you know, you get your choices of like, this is great and amazing insights. Yeah, exactly. So it feels like they've sort of gone

a bit too far on some of those AI elements. In terms of job search and stuff, it's different. Like I think LinkedIn has a lot of potential to use its unique data set to be able to help people find jobs that are going to make them happier and careers that are going to be more fulfilling based on what they can track in terms

of how people have changed jobs over time, how people with similar skills and interests have changed jobs over time, feed that into an AI system. And it should be able to give you a pretty clear career path that would sort of help you find what you're going to be interested in. So I think in that sense, there's going to be a lot more development. LinkedIn's also putting a big focus on video. I don't think anyone cares about LinkedIn video. They're trying to put their own TikTok style vertical video feed in there. I don't know that many people are watching that stuff because who needs to read LinkedIn posts in video form, really? So as much as they're trying to push towards some of those elements that are seeing engagement in other platforms, I still think LinkedIn needs to recognize itself as a unique platform, completely different to other

apps to some degree. I do think there is value in its video content, but I think it should be more focused on live events and industry events. And they should be looking for sponsorships with major industry events and stream them straight to LinkedIn. And then you can have people participate or view those events via LinkedIn. That could be a good way for them to link into professional use as a video, as opposed to short form video where you get chumps talking about how you can, whatever, whatever they say on LinkedIn these days, how you can buy your own Ferrari by selling, I don't know, whatever. Yeah. Today I a to a barista that I didn't give her a tip. And here are the 12 things that Elon Musk's purchase of X, the platform formerly known as Stable.

X, where do you think it's going to be next year? It's hard to tell. Before the election, X's future was looking pretty bleak. My view is that Elon Musk is using it as a political influence tool. I think he learned from how previous operations had basically contributed to the overthrow of certain governments as to how you could use Twitter to be able to influence public opinion and get what you want, essentially. During the election campaign, obviously, he went all in on Donald Trump and pushing Donald Trump. I think he's going to now use that to pitch to other governments in other regions and say, hey, if you want to win the election, you do what I want. You give me all the deals I want, and I will say how great your candidate is, and that will help you get in, and then he'll get the deals he wants. And then, yeah, it'll sort of be a political influence tool in that respect.

If Trump had lost, I think it would completely negate the power of that because that was his biggest push. And if it didn't work out, then it would be like, well, you couldn't even do that one. So why would he unbelieve you? But with Trump winning, I think it changes the value of X in terms of now he can pitch that as a value proposition and say, well, I used that platform. I got him elected by doing whatever else, whether that's true or not is irrelevant, but he can then say, yeah, I used that platform. I got him elected by doing whatever else, whether that's true or not is irrelevant. But he can then say, yeah, I used X. I talked about how great he was. I endorsed him.

Being the most followed person gives me a huge advantage. Being in charge of the algorithm also gives me advantages. And he can sort of pitch that as something to sort of keep those contributions coming in. So X is on track to lose money this year. It's not going to make money this year. There's no way. But whether that matters.

But should social media managers put it in the mix? Should they continue to post if they are one of the brands that is still posting there? I mean, it depends on where your audience is. It depends on what you're comfortable with. Obviously, half of America voted for Donald Trump, so half of America is comfortable with that side of things. So a lot of people support Elon Musk.

A lot of people are happy with that. Again, if your audience is there and they're active, it makes sense that you should probably focus on X. I don't know that they've seen any significant improvements in their ad platforms, even though they say they have. I don't know there's been any major changes. There's still a lot of insecurity in terms of ad placement. Definitely the way that X's system works and

their moderation system relying on community notes is not as good as actual human moderators relying on contributors. And the problem with community notes is it needs political consensus. So you need people from opposite sides of the political spectrum to agree before they're shown. And so there's lots of issues where that's never going to happen. So there's lots of flaws in that system that are probably going to lead to potentially risky ad placement. If you're comfortable with that, then there's still apparently 500 million uses on X. It's hard to know whether those numbers are declining or not because Elon Musk says it's the greatest ever and we're getting record numbers and every other data provider says, no, there's definitely everyone leaving. So at the moment, it still has hundreds of millions

of users and in niches, it's going to be valuable. So yeah, it depends on how you feel, I guess. Depends on the brand, depends on your audience, even more so, I think, than that general advice for other platforms. And then when X started to, I don't know, self-implode, other platforms came on. Threads from Instagram, Mastodon, which had been a platform around for a while, and Blue Sky, which has its roots actually at Twitter pre-Elon. Blue Sky, Threads, and Mastodon, I'm going to kind of group them together. Are they going to be growing? Is that something that social, because up until now, I don't think really many social media managers, really many digital marketers have brought their brands onto one of those three. Yeah. I mean, Mastodon, I don't think is going to catch on.

I think part of the problem with decentralized social apps is that for technically minded people, for technical people who are interested in that sort of stuff, yeah, it's really relevant. For general people, no, they don't care. So most people just want to download an app and log on and start using it, right? Whereas on Mastodon, it's like, no, you've got control and you can control the algorithm. You can control all these types of things. That's really cool. Most people don't care. The vast majority of people are not interested in all that extra detail. And if you can sell them on it, then maybe that's a value proposition. But for the most part, it's not. Blue Sky learned that to a degree. And so it's now simplified

the login process and it's basically Twitter in a different guise. And they're not really selling the decentralized elements. They're not really pushing that anymore because it's like, I just don't think that's a big thing for the vast majority of people. Blue Sky is up to 24 million users. So as much as it's seen massive growth in recent weeks, it's still a tiny amount compared to other platforms. Like Threads has 275 million monthly active. So it's like, it's not close in that regard, 10% of Threads' audience. I don't think it's going to catch on in a significant way.

I think it is catching on with the tech press. And so they're the ones saying, yeah, it's really cool. There's all the people I listen to are all over there. And it's like, yeah, that's cool. But it's still only a small amount of overall engagement. I do think the Meta's having trouble with threads in that it's trying to use the same approach it used for Facebook and Instagram in putting more entertaining content as the focus and using that in the threads context, which doesn't really work if you're trying to make a real-time sort of news, politics, sports-focused app. People still go to Twitter. The election was the big turning point,

is that people still went to X to get the latest news because they know that the latest news is going to be there, whereas Threads' algorithm is not really designed to give you the latest news. It's designed to give you the most entertaining, fun content that's supposed to be a happier version of what Twitter was. That doesn't really work, and I think that now that the election's passed, they're going to change that. They're going to

put more focus on news content, try and get more people across. But I think that's the biggest impediment for threads at the moment is that the approach they're taking is more entertainment and fun focused, which is not what real-time discussion is about. And if they want to really compete with X, they're going to have to put more of a focus on real-time content, no matter what it is, let that come through, shift away from algorithmic manipulation, I guess, in the 4U feed and switching around what people see and make it more of a pure real-time stream of updates. Then it might be able to compete. But at 275 million monthly actives, like they're doing something right and it's rising quickly, like its momentum has increased a lot

over the last few months. Obviously, people coming across from X and, you know, whatever else. But if I was to pick, yeah, out of those three, obviously Threads is going to be the winner, I would say, in the end. I don't think the other two are going to hold up. I mean, Blue Sky's other problem is money. Like, how is it going to compete? It doesn't have the money that Meta does.

It doesn't have the money that X does. And they don't want to add in ads. So it's like, well, I don't see how that's going to work. So, yeah. Andrew, when we do this again next year and we look back on 2025, what do you think we will have said was the big story in 2025? What's going to be the big thing next year? Obviously, AI is going to be the big thing.

I think that's going to still be the big thing next year. I would have predicted that X would be gone before the election. I would have said, yeah, X will not be here anymore. And that would have been probably the biggest story of social media for the year. But now that, as I say, now there's a different avenue for that, I think Elon Musk will have more pathways to funding. And so that will change X's trajectory in that regard. I think threads will end up being bigger than X by the end of next year in terms of users, but whether it's more influential is a much harder thing to measure. Whether it's more of just Meta's junk pumping more video stuff at you and it's like, yeah, this is just mind-numbingly time-sink sort of stuff, then it's like, well, whatever.

But TikTok, it's hard to tell where its influence is going to go. It depends on what happens in the US. It definitely looks like it's going to get banned at the moment. It definitely looks like Trump's not going to be able to save it, even though he said he will. So I'm not sure the TikTok influence is going to increase. So again, looking at all those variables, it's like, well, probably AI is going to remain the big thing. There was an app earlier this year where it was you could log in and AI bots would talk to you.

So the entire platform was AI bots, and they were all created with different personas. And so you would write, today I went for a bike ride, and then a dietician would respond and say, cool, this is how many calories you would have burned. And then a bot that's based on technique, athletic technique, would say, athletic technique would say, cool, this is how you write a bot.

So you would have instant responses. Meta bought that, the guy who, Meta, sorry, hired the guy who made that app. And it sort of seems like that's based on Mark Zuckerberg's comments where they're trying to head towards more and more AI-based bots that are going to be in its apps. So you'll get engagement, but it won't be real engagement. But does that matter? If you don't know, if you don't really want to look into it, are people happier getting engagement, getting comments, getting likes, getting responses, getting followers, getting all those metrics coming in if they

aren't real people? And I think that'll be an interesting test this year that I think some platforms are going to look into, like how many realistic feeling AI bots can we pump in? And do people notice? Do people like it? Are people happier? Because it's like, I mean, there was a big thing on Blue Sky that threads was really hard to gain followers, but Blue Sky, you can gain followers quickly. And that's because on threads, it's more focused on the for you algorithm, giving you stuff, you know, based on what the system thinks you want. Because of the for you algorithm, you don't need to follow people because it shows you what you want to see anyway. So you don't need to actually follow specific profiles, but on BlueSky, which was based on chronological order and, you know, you can, there's a following feed, you need to,

you know, followers're more important. But do people really want that to the point where you could have AI bots following people and you could have thousands of AI bots following you? Would you feel good about that and be like, yeah, I've got all these, I don't know which ones are real and which ones aren't, but I feel important. I think that'll be an interesting test and I think that's a sort of direction that some of the platforms are going to try and head to try and give you that conversational feel despite less engagement from humans. And I don't know how that's going to go. A strange and slightly disturbing new world ahead.

Yes, yes. Andrew, thank you for this. No problem, Stodd. Thank you for having me on as always. Andrew Hutchinson is the head of content and social media at socialmediatoday.com. Please read his full blog post about this. It is on his media at socialmediatoday.com. Please read his full blog post about this. It is on his website, socialmediatoday.com. It is called 26 Predictions for Social Media Marketing in 2025. If you are a social media manager, if you do any work for your brand in social media,

his blog is a daily must read. That is it for the Tuesday edition. I'm Todd Maffin. See you Friday for a wrap up of the week's events.