platform decay

Definition

The gradual decline in organic reach and user experience as social platforms prioritize paid content and algorithmic feeds over chronological ones. The inevitable enshittification of your favorite channel.

Example Usage

Our Instagram engagement dropped 60% this year due to platform decay—now we have to pay to reach our own followers.

Origin

Social media marketing analysis, 2010s

Source: Social media marketing and platform analysis discourse

Related Terms

Beginner

Touchpoint

Any interaction a customer has with your brand, from seeing an ad to calling customer service to rage-tweeting about your product. Marketers love counting touchpoints because it makes a seven-touch sale sound strategic instead of exhausting.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Beginner

drop-off

A sudden decrease in quantity, participation, or performance, or the place where you abandon your kids/packages/passengers for someone else to deal with. In business metrics, it's that terrifying moment when your chart takes a nosedive and you need to explain to your boss why engagement fell off a cliff. Also conveniently describes what happens to New Year's gym memberships by February.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Beginner

virality

The Holy Grail metric measuring how quickly content spreads across the internet like a digital contagion. Every marketer dreams of achieving it, most fail miserably, and the few who succeed usually have no idea how it actually happened. It's basically controlled chaos with a fancy epidemiological name.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Beginner

landing page

A standalone web page created specifically for a marketing campaign, stripped of all navigation to trap visitors into a single call-to-action like mice in a very polite maze. It's where conversion optimization goes to either triumph or die trying.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Advanced

real-time bidding

Automated auction-based ad buying where impressions are sold individually in milliseconds as pages load. High-frequency trading energy applied to banner ads, because markets apparently need to operate at inhuman speeds everywhere.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Intermediate

scent trail

The consistency of message and design between an ad and its landing page, helping users confirm they're in the right place. Break this trail and watch conversion rates plummet like Hansel without breadcrumbs.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

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underly

The grammatically questionable but somehow intuitive opposite of 'overly,' meaning insufficiently or less than something...