On Tuesday evening, I was wandering across Leicester Square in London’s West End, having just had dinner and then seen a theatre show together with my son. As we headed for the tube station after a lovely evening together, a large, hooded figure walked towards me, stretched out his arm sideways and pushed me forcefully to the ground. I was shaken, my knees hurt, and my shoulder was sore. My son said some very rude words indeed about the chap who shoulder-shoved me. I was less rude but took the opportunity to report the incident to the Metropolitan Police, who have now told me they are investigating the incident as an assault.
It turns out that I was the victim of the latest social media craze called “body slamming”. It started in Japan a few years ago and was specifically about men pushing over women as some kind of demonstration of power. It has now widened beyond that to people randomly toppling others over for a giggle. They get video recorded by their mates, and they all enjoy a good laugh together at seeing people get pushed over.
Online trends, like this, are nothing new. Years ago, we had the “cinnamon challenge”, where people were encouraged to swallow powdered cinnamon without any liquid. That activity leads to pneumonia. Worse was the “choking challenge”, where youngsters were asked to choke themselves to the point of passing out. That caused death. Body slamming is now increasing in incidence here in the UK and causes minor injury as well as anxiety and stress.
While all this is going on, if you have a premium account on X, you are now one of a select group of people who can participate in another online social media trend of “undressing”. You can use Elon Musk’s Grok artificial intelligence software to remove the clothes from images of anybody you like, including children. Yes, that’s right, you can use this social media service to create pornography. I, for one, have departed from X as I have no desire to be associated with this disgraceful firm. Is your business happy to be on X any more? It’s a question worth asking.
However, there may be another reason to reconsider an organisation’s use of social media. According to the Financial Times, social media usage has been declining steadily for the past three years. The biggest falls have been in younger age groups. Parents are increasingly concerned about the impact of social media usage on their children. The EU is proposing similar legislation to that pioneered in Australia, which banned under-16s from social networks. Other countries are lining up to do the same, including the UK and Malaysia. These bans will inevitably affect future social media uptake.
What is evident, though, is that networks that create a sense of community and shared values are the ones that are working best. Just consider how many WhatsApp groups you are in. Most people are probably doing more social activity in them than on Twitter, for instance. Similarly, on LinkedIn, with its wide variety of specialist groups for different professionals, there is a real sense of community. That is not present on places like TikTok or Instagram, where the emphasis is on “media” rather than “social”. Plus, there’s a real desire by the owners of these networks to fill your timeline with advertising supposedly focused on your needs. Just type the following into a search engine, “do old ladies wear gloves in winter”, and see what your Instagram or Facebook feed looks like later. You won’t be interested in any of the adverts, but the algorithm is convinced you will want to click. Annoying advertising is another reason people are giving up on social media – unless, that is, you want to pay to stop the adverts.
Several factors are combining to make social media much less appealing than it was in the past. In turn, that means it will provide less benefit to your business. At the same time, getting any value from social media will become harder as users engage less.
Yet, as research on digital marketing trends for 2025 shows, businesses are still betting that social media will be fundamental to their business in the year ahead. I beg to differ, and I rest my case on the information I received from a “social media influencer” this week. They had achieved significant numbers of “likes” and “followers”. But how did they get all those people to do that? Their number one method, by a long way, was to wander around town and hand out flyers inviting people to visit their social media page. Yes, that’s right – they did not use social media to get their “engagement”, they used old-fashioned printed promotion.
That just shows that people live in the real world and respond to real-world activities. Businesses love social media because it can give them a host of statistics that help their fragile egos with charts and graphs of “likes” and “shares”. Meanwhile, there’s a real world out there. The less that businesses focus on social media and the more they concentrate on people, the better. At the same time, lower social media usage will reduce the likelihood of those negative trends gaining much ground. Hopefully, that will also cut the number of people being pushed over by bodyslamming “twits” (I changed the vowel from the one my son used).
