The volume problem

Imagine standing in a room with 1,000 people all shouting at the same time. That's what social media feels like to consumers. The problem is not whether a business can post. The problem is whether anyone will stop long enough to pay attention.

We live in a world where information is no longer scarce. In fact, there is so much of it that our brains have become selective about what we pay attention to.

• Every day, approximately 720,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, 34 million videos are uploaded to TikTok, and roughly 95 million photos and videos are posted on Instagram. (SocialRails)

• Humanity generated about 402 million terabytes of new data every day in 2024, equivalent to roughly 147 zettabytes per year. (Optimaze)

• The average person uses 6.6 different social platforms per month and spends approximately 2 hours and 24 minutes per day on social media. Globally, that adds up to about 11.5 billion hours spent on social media every day.

(The University of Maine)

The attention problem

• Research on digital attention found that the average adult internet user's attention span is approximately 8.25 seconds. (Samba Recovery)

• Studies tracking digital behavior show that focused attention on a screen has declined from about 2.5 minutes in 2004 to roughly 47 seconds today. (New York Post)

• The average TikTok user watches around 265 videos per day, while the average Instagram user watches approximately 177 videos per day. (SQ Magazine)

Information overload

• Multiple academic studies have identified information overload as a major contributor to social media fatigue, anxiety, stress, reduced engagement, and poorer decision making. (Frontiers)

• Researchers studying online conversations found that users begin experiencing overload when information inflows exceed roughly 30 notifications per hour, leading to lower participation and lower quality interactions. (arXiv)

• Studies of overloaded online communities show a shift from meaningful conversation into what researchers describe as a "cacophony" where users post less original content, interact less, and rely more on repetitive messages. (arXiv)

The business implication

This is why modern social media is no longer primarily a competition for content quality.

It is a competition for attention within an environment where millions of pieces of content are published every hour and users are trained to make decisions in seconds.

A restaurant is not competing only with other restaurants.

A restaurant is competing with:

• TikTok creators

• YouTube videos

• Instagram influencers

• Friends' messages

• News content

• Memes

• AI generated content

• All kinds of ads

In practical terms, businesses today are trying to earn a few seconds of attention inside a marketplace where tens of millions of new pieces of content go up every day.

That's one of the reasons why posting random generic content struggles to get noticed. The supply of content has grown much faster than the supply of human attention.