As social fragmentation continues, marketers rewrite the social playbook

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If anything is clear for 2025, it’s that the cracks in an already fragmented social media landscape are only getting deeper. This year, marketers might be willing to slowly walk away.

“The social media landscape of 2025 will be a difficult place for brands to navigate, harder to monitor, and therefore less appealing to sink resources into,” Stephen Faulkner, director of research and analytics at global creative collective Forsman & Bodenfors New York, said in an emailed statement to Digiday.

Still yet in 2025, social ad spend is expected to continue to climb, reaching more than $82 billion, significantly up from the $75 billion forecasted for 2024, according to Statista. As expected, Facebook is likely to take the lion’s share of that spend, more than 80%, per Statista, leaving competitors like TikTok and Pinterest, and newcomers like Bluesky and Lemon8, facing off for remaining ad dollars. So even if there are more dollars, that spend will likely be more dispersed than ever.

The fragmentation trend isn’t new. Gone are the days of social media’s so-called Big Three platforms: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (as it was formerly known), giving way to emerging competitors like Bluesky, Threads and, of course, TikTok. What is new, however, is the polarization and volatility of these platforms that marketers have spent the last year grappling with, especially in light of the 2024 presidential election, that have informed how they spend their money on these platforms.

Amid uncertainty, marketers are focusing on performance marketing platforms, approaching new social competitors cautiously, and prioritizing owned platforms to reduce reliance on third-party partners like social media. This, of course, is all while facing the same old conundrum of doing more marketing with less budget as brands navigate changing shopper habits and incoming president Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs. The budgets dedicated to testing and learning more platforms have dwindled.

“There’s so much less discretionary dollars to spend now. There used to be a lot more innovation budget where you could try stuff out and play stuff. I just don’t see those as much,” said Holly Willis, founder and CEO of Magic Camp, a creative agency and marketing consultancy. (She did not outline specific client budgets.)

Tried and true platforms (mostly Meta) are expected to continue to take in the bulk of ad spend. Notably, new entrants like Bluesky and Threads have yet to roll out ad units, and TikTok’s future is uncertain as the platform could face a ban on Jan. 19.

Prioritizing creators and owned platforms

Creators and influencers have long since seen the writing on the wall, and have been looking to depend less on the platforms and own their presences with newsletters or podcasts. Marketers are just now catching up.

To account for platform outages, mysterious algorithms, brand safety concerns and more, Edelman is advising some clients to prioritize their first-party data via SMS and email campaigns, according to Robin Sacawa, svp of social strategy at Edelman. Meanwhile, other agencies like Magic Camp and MediaLink, a management consultancy, are advising clients to reinvest in influencer marketing — spend dollars with one or a few influencers to manage a consistent brand voice and show up natively across the fragmented social media stratosphere as opposed to managing that in-house.

“When it comes to social, we are right now looking a lot more into creators and entertainers, celebrities for more of the media play to make our ideas go further,” said Willis.

That’s not to say there’s not still value in the traditional paid social media buy, she added. Traditional media buys mean standard measurement and return on investment figures. What influencers offer, however, is an opportunity for brands to spend in one central location as they can show up authentically across various platforms as opposed to the brand voice being spread thin, Willis said.

Navigating volatility

Social media has always been unpredictable, but that’s true now more so than ever. Perhaps the most notable examples of this are the TikTok ban, whose fate will likely be left in the hands of Trump this year, and X, which has been plagued with brand safety concerns, lawsuits and competition from the likes of Threads and Bluesky.

Then, there’s the polarization, particularly on X, which revolved around political discourse on the heels of the U.S. presidential election and Elon Musk’s involvement. Marketers have been left in limbo, waiting to see how things shake out with TikTok and quietly backing away from X. This year, 26% of marketers globally plan to decrease their spend on X, according to Kantar’s 2024 Media Reactions report.

In navigating those changes, agencies have recently started to “scenario plan” for whether a client should withdraw dollars in light of audience shifts or an increased connection to politics, especially on a channel like X, according to Sacawa, at Edelman.

With that said, marketers are expected to keep their dollars close to the chest with less experimental budgeting, at least for the first quarter of this year, until a time when there’s more clarity around TikTok’s future and emerging platforms start to stabilize and scale. “There’s so much uncertainty, and I wouldn’t be looking to blow my budget in Q1 not knowing all the things,” said CJ Jammet, managing director and head of emerging media at Gather, a collective of independent practitioners.

The rise of niche platforms

Historically, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have dominated the social media stratosphere. They were seen as reliable for massive audience reach, more advanced ad unit offerings and performance tracking. Social audiences were centralized among those three platforms, as were ad dollars. But over the past two years, there’s been a splintering that has siphoned off audiences across the web based on users’ interests, demographics and behaviors. Over the last year or so, platforms like Bluesky, Threads, BeReal and a group of social media networks known as the fediverse have become part of the social media stratosphere.

TikTok proved to be a breakout star and legitimate challenger to the biggest platforms, and has gone from a marketing nice-to-have in 2023 to a budget line item in 2024. But that shift was only the beginning. Today, the social landscape accounts for everything from Threads to BeReal, Discord, Reddit, LinkedIn and the list goes on. Still, TikTok remains today’s social media golden child. Whether it stays that way is unclear as the TikTok ban looms.

Perhaps the most seismic shift has been the proliferation of text-based social apps, in the form of the arms race that spun up after Elon Musk’s takeover of X. At that point, advertisers called into question brand safety on the platform, leading to a lawsuit and the rise of competitors like Threads (Meta’s response), Bluesky, Spill and Mastodon. Marketers, however, still aren’t sold.

There’s a few reasons for the lack of interest, but most of it boils down to money. The alternatives to X are new and often don’t start with ad infrastructure or the scale needed for a brand to do more than squat on a username. In other words, dollars haven’t shifted to Threads and aren’t set aside for Bluesky, and experimental budgets aren’t set to increase anytime soon, executives say. Here, Meta and Google still win.

“At the end of the day, the vast majority of the dollar that’s being spent with Google and Meta is based on performance. So as long as they are performing, I don’t see those budgets going down,” said Donna Sharp, managing director at MediaLink and partner at United Talent Agency.

Dollars, dollars, dollars

As economic headwinds are expected to continue into the new year in the form of tariff proposals and uncertainty with the incoming administration, the bottom line with social media strategy and spend comes down to money.

The social media faucet is easy enough to turn on and off — something proven time and time again in election season and high-tension cultural moments. In today’s performance-driven, return on investment-crazed digital ad landscape, “eyeballs aren’t as important as engagement,” said John Geletka, founder and chief experience officer of creative and strategic agency Geletka+.

“I’m not going to go where the eyeballs are, I’m going to use the dollars. Once I’ve maximized the dollars, then I’m going to start to look for other platforms,” he said.

But, as fragmentation continues, Geletka added, “Ask me again in six months.”

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