It’s time to get smarter about content.

The Guardian reports that Facebook is continuing to see a sustained decline in users per month.

In the UK 1.4m fewer users checked-in last month, a fall of 4.5%. The social network has lost 2 million users in the UK and 9m in the US in the last six months.

Analysis firm SocialBakers, who carried out the research, showed that alternative social networks such as Instagram are continuing to gain sign-ups and popularity.

There is a question here about whether people are bored of Facebook and is  it following in the footsteps of MySpace?

People are clearly migrating away from the network, but my feeling is that users are in fact becoming more savvy about what they share and where they share it. Before the days of Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest, and Keek, people used Facebook as a dumping ground for all their content – video, images, status updates.

Now with a surge of content specific social networks like Instagram for photo-sharing and Keek for video-sharing, people are creating and sharing content for use within these purpose built environments. Facebook woke up to this a long time ago when it decide to buy Instagram, hoping people would share their images across the platform.

People are getting smarter about how they use social networks and being specific about the content they create. People are also using a variety of social networks to grow their ‘digital friendship base’ – friends on Facebook are different to followers on Twitter, or Instagram. People are beginning to recognise this and are creating content that plays to those individual groups on specific channels, rather than all of them at once. This is something that brands need to wake up to!

Brands who are using social networks to speak to customers need to think about the content they are producing and what social channel they are creating it for.

Gone are the days of making a ‘viral’ video and then chucking it out on YouTube and Facebook hoping it will stick and garner thousand of views. Content needs to become more focused and channel specific.

Thinking cleverly about how a group of people use a particular social network and why they use it should give you a huge insight into creating the right piece of content for the right channel.

[@Here_is_Sam]