Is Your Radio Station Wasting Its Time on Social Media?

Remember when social media meant checking in on friends? Facebook parent Meta recently announced that they are not really a social media company anymore in this striking admission in an FTC filing:

"Today, only a fraction of time spent on Meta’s services—7% on Instagram, 17% on Facebook—involves consuming content from online “friends” (“friend sharing”). A majority of time spent on both apps is watching videos, increasingly short-form videos that are “unconnected”—i.e., not from a friend or followed account..."

As writer Derek Thompson noted in a smart post on Substack, "TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television."

Meanwhile, consumption of video podcasts is growing twenty times faster than audio-only ones, and more than half of the world’s top shows now release video versions. YouTube is now the most popular platform for podcasts, and video podcasts are significantly outgrowing non-video podcasts on Spotify. In other words, podcasts are turning into television.

More recently, AI giants OpenAI and Meta (again, Meta) released AI "social" networks where users can watch an endless feed of videos generated by artificial intelligence and created by people we don't know. That's not "social," that's television.

Well, not television exactly, but what Thompson calls "the continuous flow of episodic video," where any single piece of content doesn't matter. What matters is the everlasting flow of content.

Wait, the flow is more important than any individual piece of content? Ditch the moving image and have another name for that: Radio.

At Netflix, screenwriters are often advised to "“have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” TV shows are literally being made to be half-watched, half-listened to. Just like TikTok.

This content "flow" is designed to be viewed by humans, but is it?

Recent research indicates that only one in five website visitors is human - the rest are bots.

Meanwhile, online bot activity surpassed human-generated activity for the first time in 2024. And bots are commiting massive ad fraud, gobbling up clicks and the ad budgets that pay for them - up to an estimated one-third of worldwide ad spending!

So what, exactly, are we trying to achieve by presenting our brands on social media again?

As for the rest of us, we're trying to market our stations, right?

What chance do you have when your fans - the ones who follow you - don't even see your content unless you pay a premium and even in many cases when you do?

What chance do you have when your social media is competing against the eye-catching, tech-savvy "TV" work of young digital influencers and creators who look infinitely more like the young listeners you want than those wonderful folks behind your mics?

And if it's new audiences we want, why should memes and spokespeople from the radio station they don't listen to entice them to do what fewer and fewer younger people are doing nowadays: Listen on the radio?

Here's the answer, as I see it:

You start inside out.

• Begin with your biggest fans and enable them to be your ambassadors. Equip them with insider information and marketing tools (special tshirts, bumper stickers, etc.).
• Incentivize your fans to engage their friends in their fandom by hosting special events or providing special privileges to insiders.
• Leverage digital tools to create real word-of-mouth campaigns driven by your fans, not your dollars.
• Skip the contests that fans are guaranteed to lose in favor of the easy ask with the guaranteed win - your good deed helps others. Make the listener the hero. Have them report back on what they did. Create a tsunami of goodness driven by your fans, engineered by you, and open to all.
• Urge your staff to step outside the front door and mingle with the fans while allowing those fans to mingle with each other in what quaintly used to be called "the real world." And do it at scale (that's important).

I could come up with another ten ideas, but so can you.

And so you should.

It's time for us to acknowledge that for each fan, the world revolves around them, not you. And not me.

What you want them to do doesn't matter. It's what they want to do that you need to be in the presence of.

Mark Ramsey Media does audience research for Christian Media - Perceptual research, digital studies, donor studies, underwriter impact studies, music studies, etc. Learn more here. Call Mark at 858-414-4191 or email markramsey@mac.com.

And if you want a strategy to solicit major donors to pay for your research, look here and download this Listener Impact Study solicitation for donors from WAKW-FM.

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