Why sharing user data trends can make social media better for everyone

In the last few weeks, there has been a media storm following the publication of research from Facebook highlighting the often negative impact Instagram has on teenagers. As the father of children aged 11 and 3½, I’m also concerned about the impact that social networks have on them today and in the future. Subscribe to Ad Age now for award-winning news and insight. That said, as someone who has worked in mobile marketing since before the launch of the iPhone, I believe in the value of social networks to connect people across borders and around town. From the Arab Spring to a positive impact on mental health and well-being, there is a lot of good that comes from social media. So how can we use social media to more effectively support young people who are using social media extensively? I recently read a case study about Finnish retailer S Group's supermarkets, which shared shopping data with their consumers. The company developed a shopping app that included carbon footprint and nutrition calculators. It provided users with data visualizations of their purchases based on each customer’s nutritional information, CO2 footprint, spending habits and purchases—which can be compared with local shoppers as well as with the wider Finnish population. Thanks to this app, which was used by 10% of the Finnish population, 48% of shoppers changed their behavior to eat more vegetables and local foods—which cut CO2 emissions. As a bonus, the marketing campaign around the app increased the S Group’s supermarket revenue by 13.9%. If a supermarket can improve consumption patterns and increase revenue by sharing shopper data with consumers, imagine the benefits users, society and even the social networks themselves can derive from sharing data? Establishing healthier habits By classifying data usage trends, the social networks—working with educators, psychologists and other experts—can establish consumption trends and patterns that are healthier for users. Whether it means limiting the amounts, time and types of videos viewed (and the hours they are viewed), or creating best practices for commenting on social posts, age-specific guidelines can be established for healthier social media usage. And by creating an annual post/email updating users about their social media consumption patterns, the social networks can create a media event that will encourage conversations around social media. This could be similar to Spotify’s annual Wrapped, which highlights the most popular songs, podcasts and recording artists of the year. Making this into a media event will spark conversations that otherwise might have been brushed under the table. These conversations will drive the true value of this campaign— greater openness about social media usage. I realize that undertaking a project of classifying social media content is an intensive and time-consuming undertaking with many privacy-related obstacles. But the benefits of showing trends and acceptable norms nationally and within a community are tremendous. Providing junior high and high school educators with local data trends compared with national trends and acceptable norms will enable frank conversations that can help students to better address issues around social media usage. Encouraging conversations at home with parents, relatives, friends and guardians can help open some of the channels of communications that have closed in the last 20 years as we have increasingly shifted from interpersonal communications to screens and social media. If social media content usage patterns can become a focal point for open conversations and engagement between friends and family members and with educators/community, we’ll benefit from the value of social media while providing guidance to improve the experience for even the youngest users. And as parents, we’ll learn some things about our kids, enriching our relationships with them while hopefully helping them make the leap to adolescence in these complicated times. Subscribe to Ad Age now for award-winning news and insight.

Why sharing user data trends can make social media better for everyone

Featured Stories