If your day has ever been ruined because you accidentally tapped on an advertisement in your Instagram stories, you’re not alone. And advertisers already know it. Brand strategy consultant Eugene Healey said social media use is indeed in recession because people are tired of seeing ads.
In an Instagram reel posted on Tuesday, May 27, Healey said that social media interactions have gone down year-on-year. According to him, brands on Facebook saw interactions decline by 47 percent in the past year, while on Instagram, the median engagement rate is now at 0.43 percent. TikTok’s engagement rate was the highest of all social media platforms in 2024 at 2.5 percent.
In contrast to other platforms, 54 percent of TikTok’s users engaged with brand content on the video-sharing platform at least once a day, and another 30 percent engaged with brand content at least once a week in 2024. According to social media management platform Sprout Social, this is because TikTok users actively sought out new products and product updates on the app. It also helps TikTok that it has pushed TikTok Shop as an e-commerce platform, which means that some users open the app not to talk to friends but to buy.
But TikTok has always been a space for consumption, be it product or media. Facebook and Instagram, on the other hand, primarily serve as spaces for people to connect with friends and people they follow.
“The public internet has become an unpleasant place to hang out,” Healey said. “Everywhere you go, you see algorithms promoting content that is fracking your attention, which means [they’re] feeding you content that’s either dopamine-optimized brain rot, or openly hostile, leaving you at best in a stupor and at worst filled with rage.” In other words, users are experiencing ad fatigue.
To avoid this, more of them are also connecting in private spaces — still on social media — like Instagram direct messages, group chats, Discord servers, and Facebook groups. “People are still hanging out online, but they’ve gone into hiding,” Healey said.
He quotes Instagram Head Adam Mosseri as saying, “[Teens] are spending more time in the DMs than Stories, and more time in the Stories than in feed.”
As a result, brands are going to “follow users into these private spaces,” according to Healey. “You can see [this] already with platforms increasingly allowing brands to enter their users’ DMs.”
In the Philippines, this is evident in popular messaging apps like Viber and Messenger, where ads are displayed in a user’s inbox alongside messages from friends and other contacts.
“But before we go charging in [to DMs], I think we need to understand that users are specifically hiding from brands because we ruined their last space,” Healy noted. “Users do not believe brands have an implicit right to be there.” He added that if brands use private messaging spaces for ads, users may “scatter” again.
