Strategic Intelligence: Social Media Sector Scorecard Q1 2025 Update

Strategic Intelligence: Social Media Sector Scorecard Q1 2025 Update

Summary

Tariffs will negatively impact the social media sector as major spenders rethink their advertising strategies. Chinese retailers, who will be particularly hit by the tariffs, are expected to cut back on social media spending. According to eMarketer, tariffs may reduce US social media ad spending in 2025 by up to $10 billion. Tariffs is a key theme in the thematic screen of GlobalData’s social media scorecard with a 15% weighting. The biggest players in the social media sector, including Amazon, ByteDance, Google, and Meta, all score poorly on the tariffs theme due to the expected negative impact.

The UK’s Online Safety Act and the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) impose unprecedented obligations on social media companies to protect underage internet users from harmful content. Meta is under fire over Instagram’s impact on young people and is facing a probe under the DSA. As a result, it rolled out changes allowing parents to set daily time limits on the app and block teens from using Instagram at night. 2025 may see more severe legislation as Australia’s move to ban social media for those under 16 takes effect while the UK considers banning smartphones in schools.

Scope

• This sector scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the social media sector over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.

• Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories. Those that miss the important themes in their industry end up as failures.
• GlobalData’s thematic research ecosystem is a single, integrated global research platform that provides an easy-to-use framework for tracking all themes across all companies in all sectors. It has a proven track record of identifying the important themes early, enabling companies to make the right investments ahead of the competition, and secure that all-important competitive advantage.
• At GlobalData, we have developed a unique thematic methodology for ranking all major companies in all major sectors based on their relative strength in the big themes that are impacting their industries.
• Our thematic engine tags over 180 million data items across six alternative data sets—patents, jobs, deals, filings, social media, and news—to themes. The vast datasets within our thematic engine help our analysts to produce sector scorecards that identify the companies best placed to succeed in a future filled with multiple disruptive threats.