The days of mechanical advantage for social media growth are over.

What am I talking about?

I mean that today, you cannot hashtag, time of day, post or video description your way to social media success.

Yes, platform algorithms still matter. And yes, to some extent, the mechanical things do matter, but that’s not how we’ll get your content seen and your accounts to grow.

It’s all about the creative and storytelling.

The challenge with this is that creativity and storytelling don’t scale easily.

In the past, marketing agencies dominated by learning platform algorithms and all the other mechanical aspects of social media traction, developing unique (and sometimes not so unique) strategies and copy+pasting their templates on each client and reaping the rewards.

Today, the content space is oversaturated. Search anything in any industry on almost any platform, and you’ll find an abundance of content Taylor made for that specific search.

Pair that with the brand boycotts we’ve seen over the past year and the ever-growing cancel culture, and you can understand why brands and businesses are far less likely and much less willing to take risks than ever before.

I wrote this article a while ago: “Are writers and designers becoming obsolete?” In it, I look at the growth of AI and what that means for writers like me and the creatives we work with.

Long story short, I didn’t think AI would take us out as long as we managed to stay ahead of the curve.

My opinion has shifted slightly.

While I still believe that through upskilling and all that, we’ll always be relevant because creativity will always matter, I think AI and machine learning capabilities are catching up to us.

I maintain that you can’t code creativity. Still, given the sample size due to the oversaturated content space and the fact that AI can simply absorb, digest and generate more information than any human at any given time, I believe it’s only a matter of time before it’s able to replicate creativity.

With the current technology available, anyone with a computer, Grammarly and a couple of dollars to spend on AI tools can copy and edit almost any creative asset. And I mean ANYTHING! If I’m not mistaken, with the current technology available, you’re something like 3 websites and 30 minutes of hard work from replicating entire e-commerce sites and yielding mad results — no marketing teams, no designers, no copywriters, managers or any of that—just you and your PC.

WILD!

Fortunately, relevance is a thing, and big brands know this. As long as brands like Coca-Cola, Toyota and McDonald’s still run ads, marketing remains important. 

But, what it looks like is shifting. As it is, I think in 2024, we will witness the death of the social media marketing agency - at least a steep decline in their numbers because brands are scared to death of taking risks, and the creative agencies responsible for their content are both stuck in a choke hold between having zero creative freedom and not knowing how to navigate the new content space.

On top of this, marketing agencies cannot really hire people who know what’s cutting because those people who know how to navigate the space will never settle for agency work because, as independent content creators, they’re not restricted by bureaucracy or any of the limitations big companies place on creative teams AND all money earned for the creative assets go straight to the creative not the board of directors and filtered through the agency leaving them with a fraction of the earnings their work generated.

So, what does this all mean for 2024?

I think, as much as we all hate the influencer trend, it’s only going to grow. 

People with existing audiences and the ability to grow those audiences through this complex content space will thrive.

Agencies charge far too much for next to no reward, and brands are becoming aware of this and pulling away from it.

Instead, I think they will put more stock in influencers than agencies. 

I dunno; that’s just my two cents.