The Muskification of Meta

What a start to 2025 it’s been for progressive Social Media marketers! Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta will be going down the same path as Elon Musk and X has chilled many of us to the bone. ODV Digital shut down our X account in late 2024, although we had been advising our clients against working on the platform for some time before then, and we hadn’t run paid ads on Twitter in a long time. Cutting off X felt the right move ethically and strategically, and the truth is it didn’t really hurt our clients’ campaigns or our business in any meaningful way.

The changes to Meta will be a different story. If the removal of fact-checking and the pivot to a “free speech” algorithm does not, as we have seen on X, result in a glorious plurality of previously repressed voices but instead only gives rise to misinformation, hate speech, bile and vitriol, then many progressive campaigners will face very significant challenges going forward.

What to do, in the face of impunity for social media oligarchs and reckless political leadership? For now, I’d suggest these three steps for progressive political and social issues campaigners:

1. Dial *up* your Facebook and Instagram organic output

This may be optimistic thinking, but the changes to the Meta algorithm’s distribution of political content – in which ‘civic content’ will no longer be deprioritised in people’s feeds – could be a favourable boon to accounts on the left, many of which have struggled with organic reach in recent years. If Facebook and Instagram are going to start showing users more political content, progressives should make sure we don’t cede this space to malevolent voices and the right: let’s try to make our voices as loud as theirs. Don’t give up yet.

2. Diversify your outreach channels beyond Meta-owned platforms

For some time now, Facebook and Instagram have stolen the majority of campaigners’ production time and ad budgets – often rightly so, since they are (for now) the social platforms with the highest reach, and the easiest to work with since they offer political ads. But having most of our campaign eggs in one media basket has always been risky. And with the removal of conversion events for political advertisers rolling out this week, Meta ad performance is likely to start to decline (with costs going up).

Now’s the time to start to spread our attention (and our budgets) a bit more widely. It’s not clear yet which social channels will rise up over the months and years ahead, perhaps it might even be a new app entirely, but Facebook is already past its prime. It now feels quite likely that the “Muskification” of Meta will drive similar results to those we’ve seen on X, with an inevitable decline in user numbers, as the atmosphere becomes less hospitable to progressives. 

Neither TikTok nor LinkedIn allow ads from political campaigners, but both offer increasing reach and higher engagement through organic output, whether that’s lighter video formats on TikTok or slightly higher brow written content on LinkedIn. Bluesky, though not yet a truly credible alternative to Twitter, may see a further boost to users if Threads deteriorates, so now may be the time to claim your Bluesky username and start to think of it as a ‘backup Twitter’. Meanwhile political and social issues advertisers will need to look to channels where paid ads are available: Snapchat isn’t dead yet, and programmatic display and digital audio (podcast ads, as well as free versions of Spotify et al) may need to take more of your ad budgets going forwards.

3. Sit tight, keep watch, stay breathing

It’s still early days since this shock announcement, and we’re getting better at expecting the unexpected. Now isn’t the time for any knee-jerk reactions or panic. We need to keep an eye on what starts to happen on Facebook and Instagram; watch our reach and engagement metrics, try to do some sentiment analysis on our own and other social accounts. Having a clear view of what our historical performance benchmarks were, and what they need to be in 2025, will help us make informed decisions throughout the year ahead. We need to be prepared to make changes if or when they’re right for our organisations, our stakeholders and our target audiences: but that time might not have come just yet. 

Sit tight, keep watch, stay breathing. This is what I’m telling myself, anyway.

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