Fragmentation, It Always Seems To Happen

How much has social media fragment the audience, and at what cost?  Traditional media tries to entertain an audience and keep it, so they can then sell advertising within that form of entertainment.  While the programming and editorial content has become corporate blah for the most part audiences have rushed over to other venues as their form of entertainment, namely forms of social media.

If you’re a local business who has relied on traditional media as your venue to hit the masses with your  image, brand or sale, how much time has been sucked away from the platform that you use?  We’ve all seen the numbers of how many people and how much time is spent with social media.  I have people ask all the time, “Where do they get the time?”

Individuals that are spending time with social media didn’t just appear out of thin air, that time has to come away from something, somewhere, and my guess would be that a significant amount is coming from traditional media, at the expense of some local businesses

Social media is great, I use it, I dedicate time to it personally and professionally, most of the time that social media occupies today is at the sacrifice of traditional media.  Not one in particular, just a combination of them, mostly because I enjoy to content and find the information more valuable through social media.

So what does the local business owner do?  Traditional media isn’t going to get any better.  Just talk too an old newspaper veteran, or someone from TV back when there were only 3 stations, or a person from radio when there was no duplicated formats in a market.  Social media has fragmented the audience, and it’s ok, it makes it more difficult on the local business owner, as if today’s economy isn’t enough to deal with.  It makes a lot of our jobs more challenging, but how much fun would our lives be without any challenges!