Quality over Quantity a Trend for 2016? Are you kidding me?

I’ve been catching up on some business reading as of late, taking a break from re-reading my beloved Outlander series a fourth time. While reading, I came across a new “trend” for 2016 that really made me think “WTH?” from the article, 5 Upcoming Trends That Will Change How You Approach Social Media Marketing...

“Quality Over Quantity. Quality has become increasingly important, particularly when compared to quantity. When developing your social media marketing strategies and campaigns, you’ll need to pay even more attention to the relevance, reliability, and value of your content. Consumers have numerous sources from which to obtain their information, therefore, you must take care to distinguish your content from that of your competitors. The best way to do that is by ensuring that your content is more relevant, trustworthy, valuable, and interesting.”

Pardon me for a minute, but are you kidding me?!?! Quality over quantity is a new trend?? For 2016??

Quality over quantity is something I’ve been practically preaching for years like many of my peers. This is hardly anything new. I’m sorry, but this is something they teach in Marketing 101 in college. It’s totally fine if you are writing an article for the newbies of the social media marketing world to talk about quality over quantity, but to call it is “trend” for 2016 is just insulting.

Let me pick this apart for a minute.

When you start using social media to help market your business you are in it to grow your business and your community. While large numbers and methods to attain them quickly are very luring, they will not help your success. I would take 100 die-hard fans/followers over 100k of fans/followers who are just luke-warm. Those 100 could/would do for me than 100k. Same concept applies to the content you distribute, as the author suggests. It should be there from the beginning, not something you need to adjust to because it’s been labeled a “trend.”

This (quality over quantity) is a principle that should be etched into the stone the minute a business opens their first social media account, not a “trend”.

Let’s talk about “trends” for a minute.

Trends are predictions or overarching themes that are going on at the moment. Trends do not last more than a few months or, if you are the chevron pattern, years. Quality over quantity is a cornerstone. It’s something that will always be here no matter what’s going on in the marketing world.

Here are some social media trends we’ve seen:

• Decrease in Facebook’s organic reach.
• Longer posts on Facebook.
• Use of excessive hashtags on Instagram.
• Using Twitter cards with tweets.
• Increase of video use in social media marketing.

Yes, you could attach the “quality over quantity” tag to those, but shouldn’t that have been there from the get-go? Making sure to implement quality in the content you put together, not matter what the current trend is?

Let me give the author of the article some credit, his four other trends were pretty spot-on – reduced organic reach, video marketing explodes, faster social media and digital assistants. Yes, those are truly trends because they may not be around in 2017. However, quality over quantity will still be here in 2017, 2018, 2019 and so on.

Share with me your thoughts? Am I wrong to think this is just a “trend”?