Social Media is giving me Major Marketing Ick

You know that moment when you get the ick? The previous subject of your desire does something, wears something, says something and suddenly, ugh, you shudder.

The ick.

The ick is a very real, very primal, gut-level warning system to steer clear of potential threats or mismatches.

It’s visceral.

I’ve discovered that I have a professional ick. With social media.

Facebook, in particular. But also X. Instagram’s not far behind.

Ick. Ick. Ick.

In the space of just a few days, two potential clients have asked me if we can help them build their social media presence. Of course, the answer is yes. Instead, I’ve found myself fudging a response that can pretty much be summed up as: why on earth would you want to spend serious cash on feeding a content machine that people are logging off in their millions?

A great sales tactic, Tricia, way to go!

It’s like walking into a car showroom and taking the client out back to see the horse and cart. Isn’t the horsey pretty, Mr Client? Yes, but I wanted to test drive the Lambhorgini….

Except, and humour me here, I think my professional ick is justified. It’s just the market that hasn’t yet caught up.

The data we’ve been tracking over the last decade tells a tale of serious decline across these platforms – don’t believe me, check out the graph below.

Whole swathes of demographics are switching off. Governments are banning use among younger demographics altogether. And it was their parents who lobbied for the ban, so we should perhaps assume that they are avoiding these platforms too. Many companies are deserting their online communities, and seeing little to no impact of this desertion on their bottom line. Their marketing purpose has waned.

So, what is their purpose?

They used to have one. The clue was in the genre: Socialising.

But now, spend any amount of time on these platforms and you are quickly reminded that that you are simply taking part in a well-thought out, vertical version of a train in a tunnel which is filled wall to wall with adverts, and the only others on the train are not really your friends.

The thing about the ick is, once you have it, it’s impossible to reverse.

The younger me once got the ick over a pair of light brown suede Merrill trainers my (then) boyfriend had opted to wear. I couldn’t unsee them. And our romantic future was doomed from that moment, along with my lifelong dislike of Merrill trainers. There’s every possibility that it was the trainers that triggered the ick, and not the boyfriend. Fact is, we’ll never know.

Anyway, social media is now that icky to me.

Can I use it? Yes.

Do I have to use it? Sadly, yes. When I really have to.

And there you have it. It’s a forced entanglement. As a marketer it feels impossible to escape but now that I’ve seen it for what it is, like those awful trainers, I can’t unsee it.

What is it that I’ve seen? What’s the marketing equivalent of the brown suede ick?

Let’s explore together:

• It’s all adverts. Like, seriously, saturated with them. And I like adverts so that should make me happy, no?
• No-one’s sharing any more. Or certainly not as regularly. Lurking, yes. Sharing, not so much.
• When you disappear from these platforms, nobody notices. I know this because I pretty much stopped posting on both Facebook and Instagram about a year ago. Nobody I’m connected to has checked in to see if I am still alive. I still communicate with others, daily, just not in a broadcast format.
• It’s the cesspit of humanity. Those who are “active” are active in the worst possible meaning of the word. It’s like walking into the midst of a House of Commons debate during the heckling session. Make it stop.
• It doesn’t seem to make you happy. In fact, it’s been scientifically proven to deplete you, and even to depress you.
• It’s costing businesses serious money, for teeny tiny returns. The conversion rates we’ve tracked are, even in low expectation marketing terms, utterly appalling. And yet, these channels suck up resource time that could be genuinely better spent on real customer engagement.
• The owners of these platforms genuinely don’t care about their users. For a planet that’s in the throes of a purpose based trend, their very purpose of strip-mining humans for their personal data and then exploiting it for money (or worse, to allegedly subvert the democratic process) is both unethical and damaging. My Facebook ick started to escalate after reading Careless People by Sarah Wynne-Williams. It’s spreading across all Meta products.

I know that most marketers are looking at their sunk costs and the last two decades of building an audience on these platforms and genuinely questioning my sanity right now. How could I suggest we abandon these channels?

Marketing rule number one is: you are not the market. Just because you are still using it, doesn’t mean your customers are.

The numbers are stacking up on this.

Meta admitted that the number of daily active users declined by over 20 million people in Q1 of 2026. That’s the equivalent of losing most of Australia in just three months.

Yes, the world is a big place. Yes, there’s a couple of billion users still, but 20 million is a lot of humans individually deciding to leave. That’s a movement, not a blip.

When it comes to tech, we’re notoriously fickle creatures. I used AOL once upon a time. I had a Hotmail account originally. I was on Friends Reunited at one point. I am fairly sure I ventured onto MySpace in their heyday. And probably Friendster. I was definitely on Twitter for the best part of a decade. None of these are in my life now.

Social media is only about 20 years old as a media channel. And everyone who understands the marketing lifecycle knows that there’s a point in maturity where you either reinvent and survive, of decline and die.

I’m hazarding a professional guess that Facebook missed their chance to reinvent themselves about 5 years ago, and have been declining ever since.

There’s more where this came from. I share more of my thinking on Cunningly Good Marketer on Substack. Subscribe to get my opinions, experience and real-world lessons straight to your inbox.