By Matt Litzinger

I don’t know about you, but I feel like we’re always looking at “the end” of something. It only feels like yesterday that we were talking about “the end of cinema” (the new Avatar just raked in over two billion dollars at the box office, by the way). Or how about “the end of television” (it is so sad to see all of the new TVs we keep buying just gathering dust like this). 

On which note, are we about to witness the “end of social media”? According to a provocative and much-shared piece in The Atlantic from late last year, we just might be. 

Like the article’s grand headline implies, this would be a momentous change in our media environment. There may even be some of us who would be happy to wave goodbye to certain social platforms, synonymous as they are with quick, snappy content that’s here today and gone tomorrow. 

In fairness, there is some solid evidence to suggest that such a sea-change might be underway. It’s been hard to escape the cavalcade of concerning headlines over the past few months about layoffs in the tech sector. On top of these seemingly systemic problems, there are also specific ones. To name no names, some global platforms have been weakened by billionaires wanting to treat them as toys, whereas others have bet the farm on a metaverse-centric future, which at present is looking half-baked. 

Add in a long-term decline on the ad spend these platforms need to sustain their business models, and it does feel as though 2023 might be a moment of reckoning for the previously imperious social media giants. 

But let’s be clear about something: whether social media platforms continue to be as influential as they have been or not, the future will be no less social than the present. The concept of social currency that sustains these platforms – that intrinsically human desire to be seen and to communicate your values – is not going anywhere. 

That’s because social currency wasn’t invented by social media. If anything, it was invented by advertising and marketing. 

Back to Basics 

The most fundamental logic that explains the success of social media as an idea, is also the fundamentals of advertising. Good advertising, to be more specific. 

It’s the notion that the brands you buy – or in other words the clothes you wear, the phone you use, the food you eat and the car you drive – say something about you. And whatever these products say, it is a message you want to communicate. 

And boy, do people love to communicate. What we can perhaps attribute to social media has been its role in turning communication into an addiction, but to do so, it has built on human instincts and desires that long predate the first MySpace page. The kid who showed up at his school wearing Levis in the 80s was – whether intentionally or subconsciously – saying something about themselves that they wanted to say. Advertising’s sleight of hand (or its magic, depending on how you want to look at it) was to turn brands into these vessels of identity and communication. 

To get a clearer picture of the future, we need to distinguish between what’s unique about advertising on social media, and what’s simply a characteristic of advertising more generally. What we can say for social media is that it has opened up access to brands and created a two-way street of communication. In 2023, perhaps Levis would pay a handsome sum of money to the coolest kid in school to make sure they wore their jeans. But the fundamental truth on which that transaction is based hasn’t changed – it’s the power of social currency. 

Maybe the social media platforms that have defined the past decade and a half are in decline. Maybe. But we shouldn’t use that idea to kid ourselves that people are going to grow bored of connecting, talking and articulating their identity to the world. To imagine that our media environment is going to be any less social if people migrate from TikTok to whatever ultra-immersive metaverse-based platform comes next would be to misunderstand both advertising and human nature. 

And the truth is that there is an authentic and valuable place for brands as part of that equation. So whatever happens when Elon Musk moves onto something else and Instagram’s audience all turn the other side of 40, social currency will continue to reign supreme in our culture. 

That’s because the very best brands are the ones with which we choose to express ourselves. It’s the reason why the likes of Apple and Nike have enjoyed such amazing longevity. Social currency is a concept that the best marketers understood long before the invention of social media – and the future of advertising is still going to be built on its foundations.

Matt Litzinger is founder and CCO at The Local Collective.