Why social media is making everyone a better marketer

Social media is one of the fastest-growing marketing channels - encompassing ~$24B in advertising spend in 2015 - more than double what it was in 2013 - and 16% of all digital ad spend.

While a lot has been written about social media as a channel for companies to sell or market (especially through content), I'd argue that the impact of social media on Marketing is far bigger than its channel-level statistics would indicate. 

Social media is turning everyone into mini-marketers

Social media is increasingly ubiquitous in our lives, with 74% of US adults using at least one social media platform regularly as on 2014.  And if you think about what using a social media platform requires - building a network, posting content to that network, growing your network - it implies that most adults (and nearly all teenagers) are now "mini-marketers" focused on marketing themselves.  And that means they're learning basic marketing skills - whether they know it explicitly or not:

Pick your audience

• First and foremost, you choose your network, or who you "connect" with.  For some people it is just family and close friends.  Others add work colleagues.  Some are comfortable adding people they barely know.  Either way, who you choose to add to your network is no different than choosing a target audience for what you plan to message

Engage your audience with your content

• Regular social media users know a lot about the individuals that comprise their social network (or audience) because presumably they know these people in real life.. and, even if they don't, they can always individual profiles to learn more.  This trains even everyday users to expect that you know your audience, which raises the bar for relevance for all social media users (and marketers)
• By their very nature social media platforms are meant to help individuals get their message out to their audience as quickly and simply as possible - whether it is a tweet, a post or even a "like."  Individuals are thus encouraged to become content creators (even if that message is sharing how proud you are of a photo of a new grandchild)
• Individuals also recognize that different social media platforms work better for different types of content - resulting from a complicated algorithm of what works best on each platform (e.g., photos on Instagram, short text on Twitter) and the composition of your network (e.g., don't share your party pictures on LinkedIn).  In other words - people are learning to build a channel strategy (and usually, a multi-channel strategy)

Analyze & learn

• Once you put a message or piece of content out there, you start getting immediate feedback from your network - through "likes," "shares" or "comments."  Much of this feedback is translated into numbers that make it easier to digest - e.g., 236 "likes" is better than 4 "likes."  And people (whether explicitly or implicitly) analyze this "data" to recalibrate their messaging accordingly.  This is probably why kitten photos are so popular, and why LinkedIn added an entire tab devoted to Analytics
• In addition, because it typically costs nothing for an individual to share more content, this likely encourages test & learn behavior

Grow your audience

• Platforms also put the size of your audience (e.g., followers, friends) front and center - it's often one of the first things you see on your home page.  And this teaches everyone that in marketing, as in business at large - the size of the market does matter, and bigger is better
• Once they've focused you on "bigger is better," social media platforms then proactively help you identify new people to "follow" or "connect" with to grow your network.  This is no different than marketing targeting, except  that the social platform is doing it for you (e.g., using your address book, look alike models, complex "targeting" algorithms)
• Some platforms, including LinkedIn, are starting to balance the focus on audience size with quality metrics - the ability to aggregate and analyze "who" is in your network is critical to ensuring that network still matches your target audience as it grows over time.  But even without analytics support, there are lots of everyday examples of audience re-calibration like teenagers manually purging "old camp friends" from Facebook once they go to college 

So - is social media subconsciously training us all to be better marketers?  What do you think?