As social media engagement sinks beneath the waves, how will you find your customers?

The crowd has gone quiet. Is your marketing strategy stuck on rented land?

Anyone who spends more than ten minutes loitering around the digital playgrounds of LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and others will have noticed a peculiar quiet descending. Not silence, exactly -- there is more noise than ever -- but the sort of noise made by a crowd where nobody is speaking to anybody in particular. The collapse in meaningful engagement isn't news; we've all watched it happen over time. Forums that once were exciting marketplaces of conversation and ideas have become algorithmic shopping centres. The platforms are now vast climate-controlled malls where people wander aimlessly past auto-curated displays, selected by a machine. For the platforms themselves, engagement was always the commodity. Not communication, not community, and certainly not truth. They have always sought attention, eyeballs – the digital equivalent of footfall.

"Why spend increasing amounts of money renting access to audiences on algorithmically controlled platforms that understand neither you nor your customers?"

Audiences matured and growth inevitably flatlined. The novelty wore off, and as people became conscious of time lost watching repetitive content, everyone quietly reached for the mute button. The response from Meta and its competitors has been predictable. If people won't engage naturally, they can be herded into doing so. Hence, the relentless "For You" feeds arrive uninvited, like a distant relative who can’t take a hint when the teapot runs dry. What you want to see has become secondary to what the platform wants you to see. Their objective is not relevance but retention. After all, the business model isn't built on serving your interests. It's built on selling your attention. LinkedIn provides its own particularly joyless illustration of this phenomenon. Every day, LinkedIn serves me promoted content on subjects I have never expressed the slightest interest in, and sometimes in languages I don't speak. Alongside these appear invitations to play games and puzzles selected by an artificial intelligence that evidently knows not the first thing about me.

This phenomenon is curious because we are also assured that AI is poised to transform civilisation. Every day brings another sermon on its ability to revolutionise education, commerce and human existence itself. Yet the immediate evidence suggests that it struggles to determine whether I might be interested in a software webinar conducted in Polish. This raises an obvious question. Why spend increasing amounts of money renting access to audiences on algorithmically controlled platforms that understand neither you nor your customers? Why not invest in channels where the relationship is yours? There is, undoubtedly, a role for social media. If you're selling trainers, handbags, watches or the aspirational fantasy of life aboard a superyacht, glossy reels and carefully curated imagery still have value. Consumer brands trade in impulse and aspiration. B2B is another species entirely. Business decisions rarely happen between swipes. They require attention spans longer than those of adolescents on energy drinks. Producing endless streams of attention-grabbing content for professional audiences often resembles hiring a string quartet to perform in the middle of an airport departure lounge: expensive, technically impressive, but largely ineffective. Perhaps the decline of social media doesn't require us to discover something new at all. Perhaps it simply reminds us of what already worked. Email, unfashionable and stubbornly effective, continues to outperform many shinier alternatives. In B2B particularly, it remains one of the most reliable ways to communicate directly with prospects and customers. It arrives without asking permission from an algorithm and without competing against dance videos, influencers or motivational entrepreneurs announcing that they have risen at 4am to optimise their mindset. Naturally, AI plays a part here too. It can personalise messages, optimise timing and tailor content. But the fundamentals remain reassuringly old-fashioned: relevance, clarity and something worth saying. At the centre of all this sits your website. A website is the only piece of digital property you genuinely own. Everything else is rented land. Social media platforms can alter their rules, their algorithms or their priorities whenever they please. Your website remains yours. And yet it is astonishing how many organisations neglect their websites.

I've been fascinated by websites for the best part of thirty years. Not because of their design — designers often overestimate its importance — but because of what websites reveal about the businesses behind them. The website began life in the 1990s as a glorified brochure. Today, it serves as a shop window, receptionist, salesperson, publisher, reference library, testimonial archive, and corporate autobiography all at once. It is where prospective customers go when they want answers. So what does your website say about you? Is it current? Is it useful? Can visitors find what they came for? Does it explain what you do? Possibly because I possess the temperament of a mildly irritating pedant, I have developed the habit of examining websites and offering their owners unsolicited observations. Occasionally these are welcomed. Sometimes less so. It recently occurred to me that there may be others who enjoy such forensic nit-picking. So, rather than keeping these thoughts private, I shall begin publishing occasional website reviews and observations under the title First Impressions. Think of it as a digital building inspection carried out with a torch, a notebook, and just enough cynicism to be useful.