Social Platforms Are Running Disruptive Promotions for Their Own Products

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and for the first time, the major social platforms are running big, even full-screen promotions for their own subscription offerings and products within their apps.

Which, in some ways, makes perfect sense, maximizing their reach capacity to boost their business. But in others, it feels a little intrusive, and in some cases, even a little desperate.

First off, X has started running full-screen pop-up promos for X Premium, which are difficult to even get rid of on screen, due to the “x” in the top left being obscured by the coloring.

Yes, X is still super keen to get people to pay to use the app. Despite the app losing users, and despite less than 1% of its audience actually paying for X Premium thus far.

Subscriptions had been a key pillar of Elon Musk’s initial growth plan for X, with Musk projecting that X Premium subscriptions (which, at that stage, was called “Twitter Blue”) would rise to 9 million users by this stage of his reformat of the app, bringing in millions of dollars in supplemental revenue.

Thus far, around 1.3 million profiles are estimated to have signed up for the program.

Musk also projected that X Premium would reach 104 million subscribers by 2028, thereby diluting X’s reliance on ad revenue. And if it still wants to reach those goals, it’s going to need to enact more pushes like this full-screen takeover to maximize awareness.

Like, also, X Premium gifting:

Look, I don’t think anything is going to get millions more people signing up for X Premium, which is just not that enticing an offering for most at this stage. But X is still keen to make Premium happen, and it’s using whatever means it can in the app to maximize take-up.

Meta is also using its valuable ad space to promote its VR headsets, which are the key to its future metaverse ambitions.

As you’ve no doubt seen for yourself, right now, Meta is running top-of-feed promotions for Meta Quest, on both Facebook and IG, as it seeks to get more people into its VR experiences.

Though similar to X Premium, the hard sell for Meta is that there aren’t that many good reasons to buy a VR headset as yet, as the available experiences just aren’t that compelling. The technology is amazing, and more and more games and features are being rolled out, which will no doubt attract more interest over time. But at this stage, it’s not a must-have tech gadget, with the available VR apps still fairly limited.

But either way, exposing ads to billions of users can’t hurt.

Finally, Snapchat is also pumping out promotions for Snapchat+, directly into user inboxes.

That feels a little intrusive, and all of these promos are a little overbearing, making these apps feel more like shopping tools than social platforms. But they’re also pretty easy to ignore. And in the modern age, we’ve all gotten much better at ignoring the influx of promotions being pumped into our feeds.

But it is an interesting shift either way, with the apps becoming more direct commercial entities, and transforming into large-scale advertisers in their own right. And they have access to the most attention-grabbing promo options in their own tools.

Which is probably not a great trend, but as social apps look to further commodify their experiences, this may be the new norm.